| Bamboleo said: Have I been living in the ilusion that iPhone had multitask since day one? I could swear that I saw a friend googling and receiving messages at the same time x_X |
The iPhone has always been perfectly capable of multitasking... but only with Apple's apps. The phone functionality is always going, apps download in the background while you surf, and music from your iPod will play while you're in most apps.
Multitasking for third party apps has been missing due to concerns of resource management, battery drain, and poor user experience. For a lot of apps, save states are an adequate substitute, allowing you to leave a document you're editing, search for a block of text on the internet, and return to your document to paste it in. But you can't monitor an IM client or listen to streaming NPR while you work on that document.
So Apple now figures it has cooked up some APIs that will allow background processes to run without substantially impacting performance or battery life. So you can launch NPR's streaming app, start a stream, then go to another app and everything in the NPR app will quit except the audio stream. Sounds like they might have made some improvements to save states, too.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
