Quote:
Originally Posted by aiharkness
Wirelessly posted
Well, I can listen to Pandora and read email and browse the web (particularly wap.balckberryforums.com) at the same time. I can open notes and cut and paste into an email, or whatever. That's multi-tasking to me, and it's no sweat on a blackberry. I don't know what the OP wants wrt "multi-tasking". But agree some people expect too much from mobile devices some times.
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There's a difference between YOU multitasking, and the DEVICE. The device doing it is when you're listening to music whilst running another app. Or email being notified whilst you're in another app. Most non-multitasking OS's allow limited controlled multitasking for their own internal built in apps - any phone will give you a SMS notification whilst doing other things, for example (the internal app to receive the SMS is in effect multitasking whith whatever else you're doing on the phone). The difference is when the OS allows any (even 3rd party apps) to keep running in background if they want. Why might you need this on a phone, you ask?
- Consider a 3rd party GPS app, for example... If allowed to multitask you can continue to track a location, re-route, etc whilst listening to music, being on a call, whatever, and the app can notify you when you've reached a certain location or needed to make a turn.
- Consider a 3rd party app that might monitor RSS feeds. You could have a pop-up or notification when a new posting was made on a web site regardless of what else you were using the phone for at the time.
Non-multi-tasking phones can do a what appears to the user a similar effect. They do this by freezing (suspending) an app when it goes into background (task switching). So when you switch to them (to paste content from another app, perhaps) you return to the background app exactly where you left it. That's fine - so long as there's no use for an app to actually DO anything when it's in background... Task switching is often fine, and saves power, but there are some apps that multitasking is useful for...