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Multitasking - iPhone OS 4 vs Nokia N900

• vegai 17y ago
  The best handheld device I ever had was a Palm. It did not multitask; instead, it required that every piece of software can save its state so it can be closed in a way that is rather transparent to the user.
• viraptor 17y ago
  Confirming that N900 multitasking is much more exciting than iPhone's. Maybe some people don't need it at all. Maybe some don't need more than suspended applications and a glorified notification framework. It's fine - they are not power users. I value the true multitasking on my N900 though. In a moment I'm going to join a weekly phone conference over Skype, put it on loud speaker, join the conference's IRC in x-chat and will be checking the links posted in the channel in a browser (probably going to look at some emails I receive in the meantime too). Yes - all of that on my phone. (of course battery will last ~1½ h as it's all over WiFi, but it does't matter that much - just going to start charging it at some point)
  • bitwize 17y ago
    But the iPhone's is more useful, easier, and less prone to introduce UI stutter, heat, and battery drainage.
    • viraptor 17y ago
      Can you define "more useful" and "easier"? The rest is a known price for the functionality. Especially - how is it "more useful" to have a stripped down version of multitasking -vs- multitasking? And what exactly is easier? For me it's a) tap the corner b) choose an app. For iPhone user it's a) tap the home button b) choose an app.
    • elblanco 17y ago
      Your satire is profound and humorous. Here, have another glass of cool aid.
  • glhaynes 17y ago
    I don't believe any of that (including all of it simultaneously) will be impossible on iPhone OS 4.
    • deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    • jbellis 17y ago
      "Notably missing? Anything for managing a conversation, like IM or Twitter, which is a big omission." http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/multitasking-comes-to-iphone-os-4-0/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/multitasking-comes-to-iph...
      • glhaynes 17y ago
        The idea is to use the Push Notification Service for that. Whether that's a good solution to the problem or not is up for debate. (It works fine for me for IM; I don't know of a service that uses it to notify about Twitter events but there might be one.)
    • viraptor 17y ago
      The way it was presented, I'm pretty sure I won't be able to run an application which should stay connected while I'm doing something else. So IRC + anything is pretty much excluded. Also skype will be integrated in a way that it takes your desktop space, instead of just being there in the background. Maybe I understood it wrong, but that was my impression from the presentation.
      • ugh 17y ago
        Skype seems to work just like the normal Phone app. Watch the demo starting 22:25 (http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1004fk8d5gt/event/ http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1004fk8d5gt/event/)
        • viraptor 17y ago
          My point about skype was not that it cannot be backgrounded, but as I said "skype will be integrated in a way that it takes your desktop space". Not sure what happens when you have more accounts - if you can do that at all and if it continues adding new bars... but I prefer it completely invisible like in N900 (especially when I have 2 voip accounts and 3 more voice-capable xmpp accounts online)
  • lallysingh 17y ago
    To add to the list, I have emacs 23 and citrix client running on this beast.
    • icey 17y ago
      That's pretty awesome. How is the n900 otherwise? Is it a good phone? Would you buy it again if you had to do it all over?
      • lreeves 17y ago
        I'm not the parent poster, but I also love mine as a phone and a computer and would totally buy it again given the choice.
      • lallysingh 17y ago
        I adore it. It's been the most flexible and trouble-free portable device I've ever owned. Edit: but I find the only issue being with some locked iTunes music -- can't play it here. iTunes Plus and what I (now) get from amazon mp3 is fine.
      • viraptor 17y ago
        I wouldn't recommend it to "normal" people - just because it's still a bit big and doesn't have that many apps. But for hackers it's just perfect imho. The real keyboard feels nice. You've got open access to whatever you want (and open-source access to almost everything). You can deploy your own scripts / apps. You can use multiple IM and voip accounts by default. If you want to try the interface, you can install the maemo sdk (scratchbox) which will just run the real interface on your screen via X display.
  • sp332 17y ago
    Doesn't the microphone pick up the sound of your fingers tapping?
    • viraptor 17y ago
      I'm normally muted during the lecture part so it doesn't matter. During the discussion I'm unmuting myself only when I'm actively talking... So in case you were interested in the microphone property - I have no idea :)
• deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
• gaius 17y ago
  OK, but it's not that Apple doesn't know how to do it, and it's not that the OS doesn't support it. It's that the user experience Apple wants to create is that whatever your device is doing, you press it's single button and it takes you back to the home screen in a known state. It's an aesthetic/usability choice, not a technical one. If you want to, I dunno, run SETI@Home on your phone in the background, sure why not, get Android, but most people don't want a) their batteries to run down unexpectedly because they left something running without thinking about it and b) apps to be using the network while they're roaming, incurring charges. Apple's single-tasking is about making the user feel in control of what is a complex device.
  • rickmode 17y ago
    Further, Apple specifically constrains multitasking to keep the user experience smooth and fun. Allowing free multitasking is a path to madness. Only a power-user would care or want it. And even though eventually a power-user would need to rebuild from scratch to remove bad apps. (Which of my 2000 apps is sucking CPU cycles now? Can't tell.. better reinstall from scratch.)
  • martythemaniak 17y ago
    Can we stop the FUD? First, how is leaving a battery-intensive service on Android different from leaving a battery-intensive background task on iPhone? (The Flickr photo upload example) Second, are you aware that data-roaming is off by default on Android and you have to explicitly turn it ON from the settings?
    • elblanco 17y ago
      > First, how is leaving a battery-intensive service on Android different from leaving a battery-intensive background task on iPhone? (The Flickr photo upload example) Because whatever Apple makes is laced with pixie dust and unicorn farts. Therefore their products are not limited to the quaint physics of the universe.
    • gaius 17y ago
      First) A tech-savvy Android user knows about leaving things running in the background. An iPhone user may not. Second) How is this relevant? If you want roaming on, it doesn't imply you want apps to use it without your explicit request. Concrete example: leave Google Maps running logged into Latitude and it will merrily talk on the network by itself.
• nick-dap 17y ago
  I've yet to see a better implementation of multitasking on a mobile device than Palm's webOS. You have to see it in action to appreciate it. As a developer you don't have to include more code to make multitasking happen. An event fires when the app becomes active and when it deactivates, but its your choice to handle them or not.
• DrJokepu 17y ago
  Sometimes I feel the whole world misses the point about multitasking on mobile devices. Here's what I think: * Existing iPhones offer an infrastructure to quickly save and restore the state of your application so that it can be "hibernated", therefore reducing the need for real multitasking. * Obviously, due to the limited display size of mobile devices, you can't have two apps running on the same screen at the same time, it just doesn't make sense, so an "inactive" app is off the screen, hence most of the time it doesn't matter if is actually running or hibernated. Just like on the iPhone. * Sometimes, you still want your app running even when it's off-screen. Things like music players (Spotify for instance), mail tools (gmail fetching email in the background) or social tools (a twitter client fetching the latest tweets that you can read later even if you don't have signal). * Notice that generally, for things that you want to run in the background, you don't need an active UI. There's no need for UI for an audio player in the background, a mail reader syncing in the background, etc. * Solution: disallowing code that is eligible for running in the background to have access to the screen. This will make he background tasks a lot leaner as it would force developers to separate "service-like" code from "application code" and enforcing strict memory/CPU limits on "background services".
  • vetinari 17y ago
    And this is exactly how Android does it - you can spawn thread that will run in background, but it will be a "service" - UI-less part of your application. In addition, there are events notifying application that it is going to be "hybernated"; basically it tells it to save whatever information it needs to restore into current state.
    • DrJokepu 17y ago
      While I'm no expert at Android architecture I own an Android phone and I think there are there are two ways an app can run in the background on Android: first, there are the "background services" (or whatever they are called) but my understanding is that there are also six slots of apps that aren't "hybernated" they're just not "focused" - they might not consume any CPU cycles but they're still in the memory. I would axe this second type of background tasks. Correct me if I'm wrong though, I always wondered how it works exactly.
• jsz0 17y ago
  "The lack of proper multitasking is a high price to pay for 10 seconds of pristine behavior." For some people that may be true but to keep things in perspective Apple has sold ~80 million iPhone OS devices with no third party multi-tasking at all. Obviously it's just not that important to a significant number of people buying mobile devices. If it doesn't meet your needs obviously you need to buy something else but why discount the motivations of other people? I like the iPhone specifically because it works really well 99.9% of the time with zero upkeep on my part.
  • zacharypinter 17y ago
    "Obviously it's just not that important to a significant number of people buying mobile devices." Probably better to say that multitasking is not important enough to affect people's decision on whether or not to buy an iPhone. I'd be willing to bet it's still quite important to a large number of people. I suspect many will upgrade their 2g/3g just for multitasking.