Quote:
Originally Posted by Barnes
There is multitasking on the iPhone in a way and will be on Series Seven phones as well ie, you can listen to music while you surf the web or play a game. The problem with full blown multitasking is there is limited resources on a mobile phone and it is difficult to provide a user with a way to know which applications are shut down vs still running in the background. You would need some application killer which makes for a not so nice user experience. On a desktop it works well because it is very clear which applications are running and which ones are not.
If a user goes and launches a whole bunch of apps and the phone starts to bog down or crash, it is much less of an acceptable user experience on a mobile device. Basic phone functionality should not be compromised by cowbell, fart machine, streaming radio, solitaire apps. Because Apple and Microsoft can't control 3rd party App code, they can't afford to allow it to crash phones when your trying to call a cab at 3 in the morning.
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It's less to do with the phone bogging down or crashing that it is the power budget. Any of these modern OS's loaded on phones would allow you to lock the pages of memory required for essential functions like call handling, so that the core functionality of the phone can never be swapped out or starved for RAM. Similarly, background process could be accorded much lower execution priority, ensuring that there are always, always, CPU cycles available for the foreground application.
But the battery life, with a browser chewing on javascript in the background, or a chat app updating the status of your contacts, a facebook app refreshing, etc, would be unacceptable. The power budgets on cell phones is unreal - they go to almost any length to minimize the amount of time spent processing anything, offloading as many tasks as possible to dedicated hardware (eg. music playback in the background), etc, all in the name of saving a few milliwatt-hours of power consumption.
Imagine leaving your browser on a static webpage, and having enough power to all day. But the next day, with a power-intensive page on a second tab, your phone only lasts a couple of hours. It would be completely unpredictable and insane, you'd never know if your phone was going to run 12 hours or 2.
From a user interface perspective, I think there's lots of innovative ways you could show a user which apps are running. Something like a light glow or pulsing of the icons, with a push and hold to turn them on and off. Or maybe, on the iPhone, you could designate the four apps slots in the "dock" as your multitasking slots, and any apps loaded down there continue to run when exited.
But even with better UI control of multitasking, the power requirements are too variable with too small a battery for it to behave predictably (and in the case of the iPhone, Apple is never going to introduce that level of, or requirement for, manual control and abstract app management in their product)