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Why don't all the Iphone fanboys don't get that multitasking is a Good Thing(tm)

Multitasking just happens to be one of those things that makes sense for some people, and for others it doesn't.

I personally would never ever even think about buying a smartphone without multitasking capabilities, I use it for way too many things and having no multitasking would seriously hamper what I can do on the phone. And yes, I do say it's bullsh*t that the battery goes empty somehow miraculously much faster when you're running multiple apps compared to when you're running a single one; I have experienced absolutely no indication of such myself. Ever. A well-written mobile app will defer drawing the screen and all such actions while in the background but will keep the core logic running and as such will not actually take much CPU time. No CPU time == no battery power spent.

It depends on how you use the phone, I assume the iPhone kernel has some deficits of putting running tasks to sleep (no task manager doing different steps). The android kernel and task manager is apparently quite sophisticated in this regard and I also do not see too much difference in battery drain between running only a handful of apps or switching them constantly.
But one thing is true, an app constantly polling something can do serious damage to battery life. In my HTC hero the UMTS chip seems to be the biggest battery consumer (more than anything else) so if you have an app in the background like certain multi platform messengers constantly polling the line battery usage goes down big time.

I almost only use them when I need them and just keep gtalk online (which behaves way less aggressive)
Also I killed off Advanced Task killer from my list which also is a big battery sucker due to constantly polling the task list.
But once you have identified those programs and avoid them multitasking on a phone is really nice. Pushing browsers into the background for long loading tasks while doing some reading, starting an mp3, pushing it into the background starting the navigation program etc... incoming call nothing else stops.

The OS designer isn't responsible for the applications and the application designer isn't responsible for ensuring power efficiency.

Not only that but you have a web browser that is processing sub-programs that it has no control over. Part of the problem with allowing multi-tasking on a portable device is that it allows the user to put a cpu-intensive website in the background when the user likely wouldn't have cared if the processing was paused.

It's a trade-off decision based upon typical usage.

Maybe the catch here is that phones ARE NOT real computers.

They may have powerful processors and gigabytes of RAM, but they are not real computers, not conceptually, not in their intended usage, and not in what people use phones for.

I seriously dislike the trend where people consider using a phone as computing. Computing is not just pushing buttons. It has to be something more.

They may have powerful processors and gigabytes of RAM, but they are not real computers, not conceptually, not in their intended usage, and not in what people use phones for.

How come?

How do you define what a computer is, for example? A machine that can run various kinds of applications, accepts input, produces output..A computer doesn't necessarily need to have a full-size screen or keyboard to be a computer, nor does having a DVD-drive define something as being a computer. So, how do you actually define that a smartphone is not a computer? Just because it's smaller? Even there, small computers have always existed. The smallest ones are even smaller than current smartphones. Or some other odd criteria?

And about their intended usage...well, smartphones ARE intended to be used like computers! That's the whole point of them: they are more than phones. Buy a phone if you want a phone, buy a smartphone if you want a computer in phone form-factor! Nokia N900 is one of the best recent examples here: it runs a full Linux system, it allows you to tinker with more or less anything...and, most of all, it is literally marketed as a computer with phone capabilities, not vice versa!

Oh, and what about the usage of such phones? How can you define what phones should be able to do and what not? In the beginning phones were used only for making calls or answering them. Nothing else whatsoever. Then came SMS. Answering machine. Games. Browser. Cameras. Music players. Who are you to define where the limit goes? People happen to use phones for almost everything the phone is capable of, that's a fact. One person might not use all the capabilities, whereas another might use a whole different set of them.

Now, you might want to think a bit next time before blathering away without any point whatsoever.

This reminds me on the early 90s when Microsoft came out with Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1 while IBM tried to sell OS/2 over its apparently extremly well done multitasking capabilities. The main stream press back then wrote articles like "Why one task is enough" or "Why you will never need multitasking". History repeats itself just from a different angle.
And again users believe the stupidity spouted out by various marketing departements which only try to hide the deficits of an implementation by marketing blur!
The problem with WinCE never was the multitasking itself but its lousy execution of task freezing and killing. But generally users loved multitasking.

Actually I know a fair share of people who unlocked their iPhones for exactly that reason they simply hated the semi single task approach apple forced them in. I am sure now that Android is seriously impacting the sales of the iPhone Apple will rethink its strategy, probably by copying Androids task handling approach (also Widgets will probably come soon I think the pogram startbar user interface is a joke, that thing screams for Android like widgets)

Or maybe Apple's engineers:

1. Looked at what people do with their phones

2. Decided that for the average person having true multitasking was not worth the decrease in battery life.

It's a design trade-off.

Maybe you should try to calm down and remember that:

1. Their primary use is a phone

2. Their secondary use is mobile computing

3. The vast majority of the people that have them are satisfied with the performance. The biggest complaint is with the carrier.

Have you even used an iphone? People are not plugging keyboards into them and then trying to load Word and switch between a dozen browser tabs while downloading an ISO file. They talk on the phone and then maybe play peggle or browse a blog at a coffee shop. You're really taking this issue way too seriously.

The phone feature of my iPhone is rarely used.

I use mine for e-mail, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook and games.

The lack of multitasking for 3rd party apps doesn't bother me. The only thing I would like to run in the background is an IM app or Skype (which is also part IM app). It seems most people only want multitasking to stream music in the background.

I don't view my iPhone as a computer, but I can do a lot with it I'd previously used a "real" computer for.

Well, for a lot of young people (and older young people) the phone part is secondary, the internet is the primary reason they have a smartphone with a dataplan. They want for example to run a IM app or skype or stream music in the background ALL THE TIME.

A well designed OS makes that possible(read up on the link I provided above.)

Edited 2010-02-08 12:22 UTC