Jobs' Mob's move to allow multitasking on the iOS4 operating system is a mess and half-hearted.
Reviews are starting to come in which suggest that the method used on Jobs' Mob's iOS4 is so bad that it is clear the outfit is trying to make a statement.
As Jared Newman in PC World wrote, Apple did not really want multitasking on the iPhone, and iOS4's halfhearted attempt proves it.
The reviewers beef with the iOS4's multitasking is that while it lets you do some things it does them at the expense of some of the things that make the iPhone OS great.
If the iOS4 had real multitasking this this would be bearable, but it doesn't.
iOS4 freezes functions that aren't in use. Only music,VoIP apps and GPS apps can work while you are doing something else.
This means that the trick of doing something more interesting while waiting for a YouTube video to buffer over a 3G connection is impossible. You have to stare at the loading screen.
To make matters worse when you open an application you have to close it by pressing and holding any app icon, then clicking the top-left corner of the apps. If you don't your tray becomes clogged and makes it hard to find the apps you want. This action is a lot like a task manager in windows.
Apple supremo Steve Jobs famously said that when it comes to multitasking, if a user has to use a task manager, the developer "blew it".
He was having a little dig at the Windows Task Manager, which is used to shut down a frozen program. However it sounds like with multitasking on the iOS4 is doing just that. Apple appears to have blown it.
Apple was incredibly unhappy providing the hardware which would back multi-tasking. It seems that its attempts in iOS4 are just a fake which it hopes will not be caught out.
Apple Insider admits that Apple's new multitasking APIs are very similar in approach to Android's which are also pretty grim.
Yes, you may call it having an editorial line.
Damn, I forgot sarcasm doesn't work on the internet.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/199528/multitasking_with_ios_4_is_horrible_apple_blew_it.html
Full blown multitasking on a phone is pointless, you end up with a rogue app in the background using up all the CPU time which then slows down the foreground application.
What's the problem with what's written in the article? As it turns out, all of what is written is true, and before you go casting iZealot stones, I'm an iPhone user (formerly a Blackberry user).
What Apple has done, besides only allowing music, VoIP, and GPS to continue to run, is fool the average user into thinking push notifications are multitasking.
I've grown pretty tired of going back from Safari to any chat application, after a push notification that I recieved a message, only to have to wait for the app to reload. This is not multitasking.
Your two informationless comments just expose you as iZombies who believe King Jobs can do no wrong.
@Giles
That's not necessarily true. Again, Blackberry (which has many faults beginning with outdated hardware) got this right. You can always tab to open apps to kill them, eliminating the thought of a rogue background app. I have no idea what they're doing about app kills in OS6 though, and given Microsoft took a step backwards with their new WP7 there's no telling what RIM has done with their upgrade.
The applications in Android, once loaded, remain in memory and respond rapidly when you switch back to them. This is nothing at all like how my iPhone handles the already opened apps.
ie What decisions Apple makes in what it thinks is the best interest of the customer (or for Apple themselves) vs the total control and freedom offered by the Android platform.
With the iPhone, Apple has severely limited not only a developers capability to what can be run in the background, but also a user's ability to control what runs in the background. I'm a developer and don't have a problem with this...most of their very rabid fan base don't understand, or care about, this issue enough for it to be a hassle.
However, and to be clear: by contrast, the Android enables a theoretical unlimited number of background processes (as spun off by applications) to run and communicate not only with each other, but also to cloud-based servers. Do developers have to be more careful? Absolutely. Does this dictate the necessity that users have more granular control of background processes? Yes. (I can easily have 20 - 40 background processes running on my HTC Incredible and can just as easily choose to Force Close them through any of the free 3rd party applications available.)
Is either method necessarily better than the other? IMHO: No. As a developer, I greatly prefer to use Android for personal use as I want the most control possible, but I'll continue to create iPhone applications as I understand that most iPhone users cannot grasp, and do not care, about these kinds of deep technical issues.