Mobile Info Planet - Latest comments on Why you DO want multitasking on your iPhone

admin [Member] in response to: Why you DO want multitasking on your iPhone

admin [Member] — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:16:14 +0000

You are right, I should have said "doesn't multitask" instead of "can't multitask" (as evidenced by all the jailbroken iPhones out there); it's a big difference technically, though not that much of difference in practice and to the vast majority of users who have chosen not to do so.

The argument about "decision based on priorities" reminds me of Palm once again: when users were begging Palm to add Wifi to their phones, Palm always responded that they deliberately chose not add it as Wifi is "too draining on the battery". Now I don't know about you, but I certainly do not want nor need anyone to babysit me regarding how I use my devices. If my phone is left without juice before the end of the day because I overused Wifi or "multitasked too much" (which sounds plain ridiculous) then that is my problem. Neither Palm, nor Apple, should make those kind of decisions for me.

But at the end of the day it boils down to this: when Apple finally *do* add unrestricted application multitasking (perhaps even in the upcoming version 4.0), I am sure that everyone will consider it to be, at the very least, a great new feature. At the same time Apple *will* market that new feature as something positive, just like they did with copy&paste, MMS, etc, when they finally added those features. And when that happens I very much doubt that anyone, including yourself, will complain or worry about "memory, processing, battery life, etc" - instead you'll just enjoy it and realize that "Hey, multitasking actually works fine!", while not missing your "pre-multitasking" iPhones one bit.

haleonearth [Visitor] in response to: Why you DO want multitasking on your iPhone

haleonearth [Visitor] — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:40:13 +0000

Hate to break it to everyone but the idea that Mac OS X on the iPhone "can't" multitask is absurd. I guarantee you that it CAN multitask, the fact that it doesn't is a decision based on priorities (memory, processing, battery life, etc). And the Calendar example given is invalid as tasks like this are performed all the time without losing entered data.

As for not considering Mac OS X on the iPhone a smartphone? Really? Wow. Plain and simply, wow.

admin [Member] in response to: Why you DO want multitasking on your iPhone

admin [Member] — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:09:43 +0000

The OS should be able to manage the memory in such a way that it does not impact on the performance, by closing down some apps in the background if necessary. This can be done according to different rules, such as closing the apps that have been open the longest, or that has been used the least. When it [multitasking] is implemented efficiently there is no or very little loss of performance. Though Symbian has its share of other problems, I think that it is second to none when it comes to multitasking and perhaps the best example of how well it can work when implemented correctly.

Memory leaks is a problem that is caused mainly by the applications, not the OS, meaning that you can easily have memory leaks in a "singletasking" OS as well; I would occasionally get them on my Treo 650 caused by a bug in an app or simply from bad coding, and you could have a memory leak in OS X as well. It's true though that the OS needs to be able to efficiently recover the memory from closed apps, but this is different from memory leaks.

In other words, I don't think that "classic" iPhone users would necessarily notice if OS X went multitasking all of sudden - at least they shouldn't if done correctly.
Nokia/Symbian has actually had, and still have, the opposite problem: many S60 users are not aware of that they can multitask with their phones, which is why they [Nokia] have now added the menu option "Show open apps." as the first option in ALL menus, with the purpose of increasing the users' awareness of Symbian's multitasking capabilities so that they take more advantage of it.

penny stock picks [Visitor] in response to: Why you DO want multitasking on your iPhone

penny stock picks [Visitor] — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:15:32 +0000

You have some valid points, but on the other side I can imagine how classic iphone users might have issues if everything switched to multitasking. First if you kept on forgetting to close down apps then you would run out of memory and have no processor power for everything else that you would want to do. Second, I can imagine this would lead to some serious memory leaks, which would also damage your performance on the phone.

sasw3w [Visitor] in response to: Why you DO want multitasking on your iPhone

sasw3w [Visitor] — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:08:14 +0000

If Apple offers more RAM and true multitasking on future iPhones (they could easily implement it the way Backgrounder works on jailbroken phones - they would also need to have a "task manager" to allow you to shutdown runaway apps) I will be jumping from my BlackBerry over to it. I really like how you can use all of the internal storage for Apps, rather than the 64-256 Megs blackberry devices tend to have.

Also, I would prefer to not have to use iTunes to manage the phone, but oh well.

admin [Member] in response to: Why you DO want multitasking on your iPhone

admin [Member] — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:30:27 +0000

As to who the majority of the people are who buy an iPhone, I wrote about that a while back. Of course in their "real world" the lack of multitasking might not be immediately discernible, but if you do use your iPhone beyond what a traditional dumbphone can do (of which I gave a couple of examples), then I do think you will eventually find it to be a limitation.

If you look at the other platforms they all multitask with little negative consequence for the user. In other words, it simply works the vast majority of the time. The point is that on a modern device I do not think you should need to be concerned about running 10 apps in the background: the OS, and the hardware, should be up to the task; memory management, which includes closing down apps in the background if necessary, should be transparent to the user and should not impact negatively on the user experience.

Regarding jail-breaking, that is geek feature for sure, and not entirely without its hazards.

Bottom line: if you think that the examples I gave are not "geek features" but actually something that all users would find useful then we probably agree at some level.

Either way, I bet that Apple will add multitasking to the iPhone in version 4.0 or 5.0 of the OS. And when they do, you can be sure that they will proudly market it as great new feature, just like they did with MMS and video recording. When they do, very few iPhone users will say "I don't need it nor do I want to be bothered by having to manually close down apps"; instead I am sure they will appreciate it.

FunkyG [Visitor] in response to: Why you DO want multitasking on your iPhone

FunkyG [Visitor] — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:22:29 +0000

If Multi-Tasking was such an important feature then why do millions upon millions of people have an iPhone?
The fact is, for every person who wants multitasking, there are at least 100 who couldn't care less, and HATE the fact you have to manually close apps down.
As long as you can multi task between the core phone features that's all most people need in the REAL WORLD.
I believe it's a non issue, created by the geeks.
Heck, there's even the option for those geeks to jailbreak their device and use backgrounder, if it's so important.

Carlos [Visitor] in response to: Why you DO want multitasking on your iPhone

Carlos [Visitor] — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:51:24 +0000

Some interesting points which is why I love my Blackberry and never jumped on the whyphone bandwaggon.