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Good grief. If I read one more article based on 'X multitasks better than the iPhone', I think I am going to scream. None of the iPhone competitors pack much

Good grief. If I read one more article based on 'X multitasks better than the iPhone', I think I am going to scream. None of the iPhone competitors pack much more under the bonnet than the iPhone, at least when talking about Mb and MHz. The iPhone already has trouble just running a computationally intensive task (such as a 3D game) with the background system tasks running. It also has problems with battery life as these apps go through the juice. Hands up everyone that has put the iPhone in sleep mode whilst there is a 3rd party app running, which decides to not actually stop running? You go back and find that you have barely any battery left. How often do you think that is going to happen to people when they are running multiple apps? I have not seen anywhere any indication whatsoever that Palm has solved these limitations. If a user truly does decide to run several apps in the background, we have every reason to believe that they will have a dog of an experience, in terms of responsiveness of the system, and battery life. Unless, as I have already said, Palm has found a way to build a system that is an order of magnitude more lightweight than iPhone OS, and nobody seems to be saying that.

Corrado 17y ago
I think that Palm made all applications, even the system ones, web apps and as such everything is running in the background all the time. This pretty much means that they have to get background apps working correctly or the phone wont function at all. :)
jemmons 17y ago
Agreed. Keeping in mind that what we know of WebOS suggests it's just a presentation layer on top of webkit and making the assumption that palm's "core apps" that provide services to lesser apps are of the same scope and resource usage as iPhone's background tasks, it seems we ought to be able to get a performance ballpark just by opening multiple pages in Mobile Safari. For those who haven't tried it, this doesn't work so well after 5 pages or so. And that's with static pages. Imagine if those pages were IM apps constantly polling the server for updates or youtube apps trying to stream movies? Certainly, I would assume palm's spent a lot of time optimizing this path that's (comparatively) unimportant to Apple. But I can't figure how that would buy anything more than incremental improvements. I've yet to see anything magic or revolutionary in their approach that leads me to believe they've cracked this basic limitation.

Corrado 17y ago

I think that Palm made all applications, even the system ones, web apps and as such everything is running in the background all the time. This pretty much means that they have to get background apps working correctly or the phone wont function at all. :)

jemmons 17y ago

Agreed. Keeping in mind that what we know of WebOS suggests it's just a presentation layer on top of webkit and making the assumption that palm's "core apps" that provide services to lesser apps are of the same scope and resource usage as iPhone's background tasks, it seems we ought to be able to get a performance ballpark just by opening multiple pages in Mobile Safari. For those who haven't tried it, this doesn't work so well after 5 pages or so. And that's with static pages. Imagine if those pages were IM apps constantly polling the server for updates or youtube apps trying to stream movies? Certainly, I would assume palm's spent a lot of time optimizing this path that's (comparatively) unimportant to Apple. But I can't figure how that would buy anything more than incremental improvements. I've yet to see anything magic or revolutionary in their approach that leads me to believe they've cracked this basic limitation.