I have been reading a lot of rants from iPhone users requesting ‘multitasking’ for a long time now. Basically, multitasking lets users do more things with their smartphone at once. Let me give you a example of what it could mean in real life use:
- Listen to music in background while typing an email or browsing the web
- While on phone/video call you can open up your music player app or radio app or web browser and show share the latest music that you found or are hearing with the other party.
- Open a word document (keep it open in background) while you go and take care of a email response or quickly check the stock price on your browser and you then decide to start your music and go onto editing your word document (remember the same one you were editing in the same state:)
- You can go on and on and on….
This is the way we typically do interact with our PCs’ or Mac’s – unknowingly sometimes.
So why is it taking iPhone to enable such functionality? Let me give you some more details – smartphone tend to have limited resource (low power cpu, very little memory, slower memory) than traditional desktop PCs’. The iPhone3GS is quite beefy in terms of resources (CPU, memory etc) – BUT, the software that enables multitasking needs to be developed (sometimes rewritten) and thoroughly tested. The usages cases for the platform which needs to be verified exponentially increase when you can do multiple things at the same time. This take time to iron out! Be patient. Well if you cant wait…
Lot of ‘real’ smartphones available now like Nokia N900 (multitasking video) , Motorola Droid, Palm Pre (multitasking video), Samsung i8910 have multitasking capabilities and have similar/better hardware than the iPhone – if you cant wait for the Apple God’s to bless you with a multitasking SW update – get one of these device now!
Open Disclaimer: I work for TI on OMAP chips that power most of the new multitasking smartphones…!