Steve Jobs is not going to let a half baked solution out the door. The iPhone User Experience is really the product, not a cell phone.

So I can see some multitasking support added to allow some of the core apps to work simultaneously or to work in concert with a single active 3rd party app but I’d be mightily surprised if you can run two or three 3rd party apps.

Ok, maybe that was a little cruel but I wanted to make the point that multitasking has been fairly standard for computing for a long, long time. Sure you can work around it, but why put up with Apple making you work around it?

Even AT&T don’t agree that multitasking is not needed – see their talk and data at the same time adverts! Apple agree it’s needed too so they made sure that you could at least talk and do one other thing.

I guess ‘denial’ isn’t just a river in Egypt eh?

If I had my guess it Apple would be against general multitasking for the same reason they were against cut and paste, MMS etc – there is a fundamental problem they need to sort out first. Then the whole ‘battery life’ excuse will disappear down the memory hole…

In the mean time they’ll throw up red herrings and we’ll gobble them down and pretend they’re the finest dining…

Who is really multitasking on their phone? I use mine for just about everything but I don’t find myself needing to read a document, open 3 emails, play a game, check ESPN, and get directions at the same time! And if you are GO GET A LAPTOP! I can only imagine battery life is going to go right into the toilet since people will simply leave a ton of stuff running becuase they forgot about it.

I would like to see some sort of multitasking. The 3GS was a major refinement in my opinion in the hardware area and is drastically different from the 3G. If you have ever used a 3GS and then used a 3G it’s amazing the difference in speed and polish. 3GS is what the 3G should have been.

1Gig ram in the Tablet, 512 in the 4th gen iPhone.

This year, I reckon we’ll get double the RAM (for multi-tasking in OS 4) with a similar CPU/GPU but at 45nm for lower power consumption.

If Apple were to add multi-tasking, they would probably put a limit on the amount of memory an app can use in the background AND limit the number of apps that can run in the background.

They might even only allow daemons to run in the background with APIs similar to Grand Central Dispatch. When the application “quits”, it would start the background daemon. This would allow the OS to control CPU utilisation so the phone doesn’t get bogged down due to background processes.

just because Jailbreak can background doesn’t mean Apple considers it consumer robust. Cycorder does video on 3G, Apple only does it on 3GS.

I’m guessing they want it nearly bullet proof.

I also predict that the next iPhone will not have its RAM bumped up to 512 MB. No one really needs to run more than 3 to 5 apps on a phone at the same time; what you need is a smart way of closing background apps when you run out of system resources. Also, Apple will want to carry along the iPhone 3GS users with their new OS update; I don’t think Apple would increase the screen resolution and bump up the RAM for a hardware update at the same time. 256MB of RAM sounds like more than enough from the reports of people who are multitasking on the iPhone now.

However, the Tablet may have 512 MB of RAM, because it will support larger, more complex apps and will be used primarily as a stationary device.

As far as battery life goes with the multitasking, I don’t believe it’s a real issue. WM, at least in the past and probably still now, never really closes any apps but instead just puts them in the background. That was by default. To do a “hard close” you used to have to get a 3rd party app to supply that function. What does drain battery power is streaming media over wifi or 3G. If any single app is constantly receiving data, that is going to have a much greater impact on battery life than having 5 apps that don’t stream data running at the same time.

I also believe that increasing the processor speed and optimizing its performance are more the key to multitasking with the iPhone, than the amount of RAM (since the amount of RAM is sufficient right now). A faster CPU will enable the device to get tasks done faster, so that it can throttle down for greater periods of time than a slower CPU. The current GPU should be able to handle 800×480, but a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU or something similar may be in the next iPhone, while the GPU remains the same.

http://i1010.photobucket.com/albums/af226/MyIPscreen/e5a4c118.jpg

http://i1010.photobucket.com/albums/af226/MyIPscreen/eb9ea7ef.jpg

http://i1010.photobucket.com/albums/af226/MyIPscreen/849c9597.jpg

I agree that many wouldn’t use user selectable backgrounding (like purposely leaving skeeball running), but background/multitask apps are critically needed for location based apps. Also, I think apps with system hooks – like caller id web search, etc, have a big future.

http://www.diverse-group.com/page1/blog.html

There are other memory management options available too…

For one, keep in mind that we don’t have just 128MB/256MB of RAM, we also have 8GB-32GB of solid state flash storage here. While we don’t want to be swapping out needlessly (due to flash read/write cycles, and relative slowness of writing to flash), if the OS were to track dirty pages, everything else could be dumped from memory immediately when RAM is in short supply. Things like coredata could be updated to mark pages as disposable even when they’re technically dirty if the underlying data is already written to flash and the data in RAM is really just a cache that can be rebuilt.

Another option would be to not run regular applications in the background at all, but instead, only allow daemonized apps to run in the background and limit their memory usage. An instant messenger might have a small daemon that handles all communication with the underlying chat service(s), then when the user brings up the chat app, the chat app connects to the daemon to retrieve conversation threads for display.

This advantage of daemonizing background apps is fairly straightforward, you don’t want the UI to hog limited memory when it’s not actively needed.

Of course if Apple really cared about memory and the related user experience, Safari would get out of RAM before limited RAM impacts app performance.”

What he said!

Also, where does it say that the Palm Pre Plus have 512 Mb of RAM, as far as I knew it had double storage (16gb instead of 8gb) and no centre button. The next iPhone will possibly have double the RAM of the 3GS, faster processor and increased storage but that will be it. I think that Apple will be concentrating more on the tablet they are supposed to be building and OS 4.0. I think that the table device will have the multitasking capabilities that every one wants from the iPhone OS platform.

Could be wrong but hey that’s just my opinion.

For one, keep in mind that we don’t have just 128MB/256MB of RAM, we also have 8GB-32GB of solid state flash storage here. While we don’t want to be swapping out needlessly (due to flash read/write cycles, and relative slowness of writing to flash), if the OS were to track dirty pages, everything else could be dumped from memory immediately when RAM is in short supply. Things like coredata could be updated to mark pages as disposable even when they’re technically dirty if the underlying data is already written to flash and the data in RAM is really just a cache that can be rebuilt.

Another option would be to not run regular applications in the background at all, but instead, only allow daemonized apps to run in the background and limit their memory usage. An instant messenger might have a small daemon that handles all communication with the underlying chat service(s), then when the user brings up the chat app, the chat app connects to the daemon to retrieve conversation threads for display.

This advantage of daemonizing background apps is fairly straightforward, you don’t want the UI to hog limited memory when it’s not actively needed.

Of course if Apple really cared about memory and the related user experience, Safari would get out of RAM before limited RAM impacts app performance.

And thank you for typing my name, as painful as it was, I appreciate it.

However. I am not even sure if Apple will enable multi-tasking (I hope they do) also what happens to the notifications system, would it be scrapped when MT is enabled?

It has been awhile since we’ve seen a FW update. I hope when OS4.0 comes the 3GS get’s all the features.

A couple I’d like to see: AVRCP multi-tasking or limited multi-tasking of 3rd party apps more control over alerts (changing the sounds for SMS, etc etc)

But my question is, will the price of the phone go up with all these great upgrades ( ram, iChat camera,…)????