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Comments: 345 + - Apple: Multitasking In For iPhone 4.0? on Thursday March 11, @02:57PM
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iphone
The latest word on the iPhone is that the 4.0 OS will finally have
honest-to-goodness multitasking. This could hopefully lead to things like a real chat client, and dangerous battery consumption. I still hope it's true.
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ipad might be worthwile (Score:3, Insightful)
this would be AWESOME for the ipad, might even make it worthwhile.
Re:ipad might be worthwile (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The multitasking aspect is essential for things like keeping an instant messenger or VoIP app running in the background (a 24/7 scenario here)...
Although I've got to say - most Android IM apps suck at staying connected in the background. Fring, eBuddy, Nimbuzz - they all disconnect (and then don't reconnect automatically!) or crash after a while...
Re:ipad might be worthwile (Score:4, Insightful)
You obviously don't think about the usecases very much.
I was using my Nokia E71 the other day and it was tracking my walking using GPS (Sports tracker) in the background. I was checking directions with Ovi maps and looking things up online in the browser. So all were running at once.
In your world my tracker application would been killed the moment I switched to another tool. That it totally useless and the reason I will never use an iPhone as long as multitasking is missing.
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i'll believe it when i see it (Score:3, Insightful)
A minor point... (Score:5, Informative)
The iPhone OS has always had real pre-emptive multitasking. The phone, email, iPod, calendar, and other applications run all the time and can do things simultaneously.
Multitasking just hasn't ever been made available to 3rd party developers.
It has never been a technical limitation in the OS. Rather, Apple kept control over it for battery life and security reasons.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That's funny. My android device can multitask (any app, not just the ones Apple lets you multitask with), and the battery life is solid as well.
Perhaps Apple is full of shit and just wanted to shaft users/developers again?
Re:A minor point... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I prefer it this way. When I'm using any app the only thing I want interrupting me is a phone call. And the only thing I want running in the background is iPod, which already does. If multitasking third party apps becomes an option I'll probably turn it off.
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Re:A minor point... (Score:5, Informative)
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mmmmyep (Score:4, Insightful)
That's great. Good thing the iPhone has a halfway intelligent notification system, isn't it?
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Re:A minor point... (Score:4, Insightful)
You prefer being limited to using only Apples music player? Personally on my phone I listen to streams from last.fm as much as I listen to local MP3s, and I wouldn't be able to do that on an iPhone.
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Re:A minor point... (Score:4, Insightful)
Its kinda cool - having multitasking on my Symbian phone. While a web page is loading (thanks at&t - fastest network alive... cough cough) I can flip over and check my email, or change a track on an album I'm listening to.
Your argument is so similar to the ones the ms-dos users on our local bbs used to use when I told them how wonderful multi-tasking on my Amiga was. In other words - I don't have it and I'm glad for it!
My response was always something like - I like listening to music, managing files, editing graphics etc etc while responding to this post - while the machine was busy applying a filter, copying a file or playing a mod I was still typing away on another app.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My understanding was that music would play in the background, but that the iphone wouldn't download web pages, and email at the same time.
Re:A minor point... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of UI design concerns as well. Currently there is no standard UI for dealing with apps running in the background. The phone gives you a green bar across the top of the screen. The iPod gives you a special alert with buttons when you double click the home button and a play icon in the top right of the screen. The calendar doesn't have any UI at all, it just alerts you with a message. The Mail app displays a numeric badge and plays a sound (a feature available to all 3rd party apps using the notification API).
It will be interesting to see how they unify the UI for running multiple apps at once without compromising the usability of the device.
My guess is that everything will basically look and function the same, except the App's icon will have a glow or a badge indicating that it is running in the background. Each app will have to explicitly be granted permission to be able to run in the background by the user (same way each app has to be allowed to send notifications now).
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Re:A minor point... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:A minor point... (Score:4, Informative)
Already being on Verizon, the Droid cost me an additional $30/month over the cost of service for a non-smart phone. It's a family plan.. we have four phones on for slightly over $100 per month. The general prices between AT&T and Verizon aren't significantly different... one may be better or worse, depending on the specifics of what you want. The data plan, at least for individuals, is the same... "unlimited" data for smart phones (where "unlimited" in both cases is subject to arbitrary definitions, both companies will go after you if you're using more data than they think possible under their license... like tethering)
As for coverage, the entire Verizon network is 3G, only about 20% of AT&T's (by area, not by population) is 3G. That's nothing more than the difference between CDMA and GSM... the CDMA 3G protocols run over the same frequencies and bandwidth used for 2G/Voice, while GSM always requires additional bandwidth, and often, additional frequencies. This is further compounded by today's AT&T being a mix of two previous companies, Cingular and AT&T Mobility. Cingular bought AT&T Mobility to become the country's second largest cellular network, after Verizon. But AT&T Mobility was using DAMPS (they called it "TDMA"), not GSM. So the company has spent many years just establishing full 2G GSM coverage and phasing out DAMPS (the DAMPS network went dark in mid 2008). This is also why AT&T's slightly more likely to drop calls than other GSM networks... DAMPS has slightly better coverage than GSM, so upgraded DAMPS cells are often not ideally placed for GSM.
At its peak, the AT&T network is faster than Verizon's. Regular HSPA cells deliver up to 3.6Mb/s down to clients, versus 3.1Mb/s down to clients for CDMA's EvDO Rev A. By this summer, AT&T will have HSPA+ coverage in as many as 40 cities, which can deliver 7.2Mb/s down to clients, if you have a fast enough phone (you'll need an iPhone 3GS for this, and the iPhones are all still crippled on the upload side... HSPA+ can go upstream at up to 2Mb/s, but iPhones only do 384kb/s). All networks degrade over distance, and all fall back to "EDGE" speeds if you're too far from a cell site for 3G performance. AT&T and Verizon both have an advantage in range, though, generally being the companies owning one of the two 850MHz slots available in any area of the USA. You get much better range at 850MHz than at 1900MHz... Sprint does its 3G at 1900MHz (and WiMax 4G at 2500MHz, though they don't have any 4G phones out yet), T-Mobile does 2G at 1900MHz and 3G split between 1700MHz and 2100MHz. Verizon is starting 4G service at 700MHz this summer, using the LTE standard; AT&T will be starting 4G next year, also at 700MHz (Verizon won the largest 700MHz spectrum block, 20MHz of spectrum, while AT&T got the other big win here, 12MHz worth of spectrum).
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Multitasking has never been a huge security problem, so long as inter-process communication is disabled. Sure, it introduces file and device access control issues, but the OS should be handling that properly, multitasking or not.
For the record, the iPhone does have the ability for apps to save their state, which is a poor man's multitasking. But true multitasking isn't really necessary in a form factor like the iPhone. A desktop PC, sure, a laptop, maybe, but it's rare to ever be doing multiple things at on
I hope it's optional in settings (Score:5, Insightful)
There are real uses for multitasking, which the iPhone already does - like listening to iPod while surfing or the like. Maybe chat as mentioned, but I also hope to set which apps can be multitasking - I don't trust the developers always to make the correct call - there is no reason to leave a game running in the background while I surf, it would be better to save state. I would actually say saving state and resuming again is better the vast majority of times over running in the background.
But oftentimes I try to hang up the phone by hitting the home button instead of the end call button (even though I think I did), and while surfing, I still see that "Return to Call" blinking on top.
To conserve battery life, I already turned off push notifications and other things. And I would turn off multitasking for my parents phones, they hardly can use a computer as it. With this, they'll only be wondering why the phone battery is dying even faster.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As an iPhone developer, I can tell you this just isn't coming. Apple has lots of (NDA'd) guidelines about how much CPU juice you get (since iPod etc can work through your app) and this would seriously topsy turvey the existing software base. They have gone out of their way to make a UI that works well without multitasking, and stuff like APNS was engineer specifically not to require it.
Aside from having my SSH sessions die when I want to goto an email or phone call, multi tasking has never actually been lac
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CPU usage guidelines that the developers don't know about are not guidelines.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the key, especially for your parents, is making it very obvious as to whether you are closing or backgrounding a program. That's one of the things I hate about my Blackberry Curve 8330. Almost every app is different, some you "Exit", some you "Close", some close when you hit the back button, some stay open when you hit the back button.
It makes it a pain in the ass to try and figure out what all you have running.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Android 2.1 has a task manager under Settings/Applications/Running Services. I never use it to kill apps though. Apps that don't multitask right get uninstalled from my phone.
Another feature Android will steal, no doubt! (Score:5, Funny)
This is why Apple should sue the shit out of Google, because once iPhone OS 4 is available, Google will inevitably steal every single idea from it.
Existing Apps? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The OS kills any application after 5 seconds that does not end itself when told to quit. It has nothing to do with preventing 2 apps from running at the same time. Rather, it is because there is no provision to switch apps in the UI, so if the app didn't quit quickly, it would appear to hang the phone.
The only requirement on timing is that state must be saved quickly to avoid data loss when the watchdog kills the process.
It's already been there (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's already been there (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:It's already been there (Score:5, Informative)
For some time now, I have been able to listen to music and browse the web, text, chat, etc. by just switching apps.
Uh, you do know you can do that with a non-jailbroken iPhone, right? You didn't mention anything that a stock iPhone is incapable of doing so, if that's why you jailbroke your iPhone, you wasted your time... If there are other apps that you're running with backgrounder, fine, but that was a bad list of example tasks given the iPhone can do that out of the gate.
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Re:It's already been there (Score:4, Interesting)
The apps most likely to be running in the background on my phone are various audio players, google navigation, and other various gps apps for recording trip information.
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not sure why (Score:5, Insightful)
In the old days, we had background processes that always had to run. Now we have signals and the like that can awake idle processes so they do not have to run. Then we had TSR applications, and similar items on the Mac, like the Talking Moose. The former was created to solve the long start up time of applications on DOS and Windows. Multiple windows and such were useful on the PC, with larger screens, but somewhat harder to use on the Mac. The Mac seemed to launch applications faster, so I don't have a recollections of being annoyed that Finder was not multitasking.
Multitasking is a solution to solve some problem on the general computer. I am not sure it is the right solution for a small screen mobile small battery device. I would rather see innovative solutions rather than rehashing the same old thing. I think there this might be a useful solution for the iPad. My concern is that iPhone 4.0 is built for the next iPhone, and will make current iPhones harder to use. This is what happened with iPhone 3.0, which does not run very well on the first generation iPhone.
Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs (Score:5, Interesting)
I've had my Nokia N900 for a couple of months now, and for those unaware, most of the specs are identical to the iPhone 3Gs 32Gb. Well, except that it has a much higher resolution screen, a keyboard, a real GPS, an FM transmitter and a microUSB port for data and charging. But the CPU/GPU and amount of storage are the same, except that you can also add a microSD card to the N900. But now on to the most important difference to the 3Gs. I've used both my N900 and a 3Gs, and the 3Gs just feels sluggish, while having half the functionality.
Flipping home screens on the N900, regardless of how many icons and widgets it's running is smooth, with no clipping. Even with half a dozen apps running in the background, the UI remains equally fast (several instances of the Firefox, Application Manager, Communication app, Contacts app, Skype, MediaBox, battery-eye, conky, etc). Flipping through the 3Gs icon screens clips and feels choppier. It's not a large difference, but keep in mind the hardware is identical and the iPhone has NO applications running in the background.
The N900 also starts up applications faster, in most cases instantaneously. Start up times do increase progressively after about 3-4 large apps are already loaded and actually doing stuff in the background (Firefox loading up pages, Application Manager checking for updates, MediaBox playing music). But many utilities that only refresh while in the foreground do not have any impact at all (Conky, battery-eye, disk usage, etc). In contrast, the 3Gs takes a couple of seconds to load up pretty much every app I tried, regardless of how limited its functionality is, and complex apps take even longer.
Once the apps are running, they are roughly equally fast on both the N900 and the 3Gs. But as I stated above, the N900 may be running several apps in the background, and the foreground apps do not slow down at all.
I think this is why Apple did not allow multitasking up to now. Given how slowly single apps load on their flagship 3Gs, true multitasking will bring it down to its knees. The iPhone OS takes much more resources to run than Maemo or Android, and the iPhone single tasking is a way of masking it. Of course this is speculation since except for the basic Apple apps, nobody managed run more than one app at the same time on the iPhone. And I'm sure those Apple apps are optimized and tweaked to hook into the OS and stay loaded at all times. Most likely the 4G will have a faster processor and more RAM, and will compensate for the OS shortcomings through brute force.
Re:Please enlighten me (Score:5, Interesting)
The latest N900 firmware resolved a LOT of issues. Not sure what firmware the review phone is using, but looking at his theme, it's an older one. My N900 with firmware 3.2010.02-8.002 released about a month ago loads up ALL apps faster than in the review. Same goes for the touchscreen lag. The next firmware, due to be released in a couple of weeks will improve things even further.
But that's not all. :) The N900 also gets faster as you use it. After a cold boot the RAM has 100Mb used, but after loading all sorts of apps it goes up to 153Mb and stays there. Those extra 50Mb contain cashing data for all your apps. I just tried every app I could think of: Communications (SMS and IM), Firefox, Contacts, Phone, Media Player (not MediaBox), Disk Usage, battery-eye, Settings, Application Manager, File Manager, Xterm, PDF Reader, Email. Every single one loaded up instantly, in less than 1 sec.
The only offender is MediaBox, because it insists on scanning your entire device for music, movies, etc. BTW, the N900 can play regular AVI movies without dropping frames or losing sound sync, AND it can output to any TV. I watched 9 (the entire animation movie) full screen on my HD TV the other day. :))
And I NEVER need to reboot my N900, it's rock solid. Even if the first time you start the apps it takes as long as on the iPhone, after 10 mins of use it's much faster.
Well olddotter, the N900 has to perform all the phone related tasks you've listed as well. So your point doesn't apply.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I am getting at least 1 day for a charge, usually 2 days. BUT here's how I use it:
- 1-2h worth of phone conversations over GSM with a BT headset.
- 1-2h a day as an ebook reader. Fbreader is AWSOME, between my old N800, N810 and now N900, I think I read 100 books using these devices.
- Constantly connected to WiFi (where available, which is almost everywhere for me) or 3G, checking my gmail accounts every 5 mins throughout the day, being available on skype, etc.
The difference between 1 day and 2 day charges i
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As the owner and user of a first-generation iPhone running 3.1.3, I haven't noticed any lagginess.
Newton / Android style would be good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the kind of background processing that the Newton used, which has some things in common with what Android does (specifically Android "services"), would be awesome. The main problem is that developers are really not used to working this way.
Basically, you have your main app, and it runs when it's in the foreground, and that's it. But you also have these other chunks of code that the app can register with the system. On the Newton you could attach that code to the OS-level alarm mechanism ("when this alarm that I just asked the system service to execute for me at that timestamp fires, don't show a dialog box or play a sound, run this bytecode instead"). On Android, it can be a daemon-like thing that actually runs in the background (eg. to play streaming music).
The fundamental idea is that the whole app isn't doing background processing -- instead you break of very small pieces and those run in the background, under much more severe constraints. (The distinction between cron-like and daemon-like isn't really critical here. The developer still has to be trained to break their app up into distinct pieces with different constraints, instead of having one big app.)
This is simply not the architecture a lot of developers are used to (though Unix folk have a head start). But it's a way to provide actual real usable multitasking on a device like this without crushing the memory and battery usage (especially if you use the alarm-based method and your apps can schedule the alarms far apart; for some apps this is more than adequate).
Some programmers would certainly yell if they had to jump through that kind of hoop. But something like that could very well be the best compromise on these devices.
Phone multitasking != PC multitasking (Score:3, Informative)
I can't stand hearing everyone talk about multitasking on things like Android devices as though it works the same way as it does on their desktop PC. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The first form of multitasking on Android is that applications can elect to receive messages, e.g. "someone is calling", or "wifi state changed".
If you actually need to do constant work in the background (e.g., listening on a network port), you can do so as well, using a "service". And even services will be killed by the system if resources are needed.
No one is talking about running a Handbrake encode session, Firefox with a bunch of animated Flash ads, and a kernel compile at the same time on their phone.
Multitasking on a phone is being able to record breadcrumbs of a journey with a GPS app, listen to streaming internet radio, and receive notifications from an instant messaging client at the same time.
They haven't been phones for years (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a computer with wireless.
Re:They haven't been phones for years (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a computer with wireless.
It is and it isn't. Apple seems to think they've finally hit on the much anticipated "computer as consumer appliance" while most geeks think it should just be a computer which does phone calls. This is the reason for most of the controversy around some aspects of the iPhone and iPad.
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That's their loss.
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While I think that is true of every other smart phone on the Market, based on mobile browser statistics, the iPhone is the exception.
Streaming music player + other app (Score:2)
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Well if multi tasking is implemented as a series of call backs so that any process that is waiting on data is not consuming clock cycles then there should be no more drain when "multitasking" then when running one application. I have never written anything in objective C but with most of my embedded c programming I am able to put any processes that is not doing anything to sleep, so it does not consume extra power.
As far as I can tell using the backgrounder on my jail broken iphone when not actively working
Re:Streaming music player + other app (Score:5, Interesting)
Well if multi tasking is implemented as a series of call backs so that any process that is waiting on data is not consuming clock cycles
iPhone OS is a UN*X; multi-tasking is ultimately implemented as "calls that wait for something to happen end up making a system call and the process blocks".
then there should be no more drain when "multitasking" then when running one application.
...unless, for example, an app is continuously updating the display, showing an animated ad, or displaying a game screen, or.... Perhaps the app would be told "you're going into the background, stop updating the screen (but don't necessarily stop playing audio)".
s far as I can tell using the backgrounder on my jail broken iphone when not actively working most programs still consume cycles.
What indicates that they're consuming cycles, rather than just blocked in a system call?
So almost all of this could be fixed if the wait() call is not properly implemented in the lib.
As per another comment of mine, iPhone OS being a UN*X, wait() is the call you use if you've started a subprocess (fork()/vfork(), posix_spawn()) and you wait to wait for it to exit. There is no single call that is the call to wait for something to happen - there are a whole bunch of blocking system calls such as read(), recv(), recvmsg(), connect(), etc., as well as the usual wait-for-events calls such as select(), poll(), and kevent(), plus the Mach messaging calls. Most apps probably use higher-level APIs that are built atop them.
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Well if full-duplex is your definition of multitasking, you'll be pleasantly surprised to know that the iPhone already multitasks just as well as the StarTac.
Re:It's a freakin' PHONE (Score:5, Interesting)
The Apple UI is so smooth compared to Android's, there really is no comparison. I HATE lag when I'm dealing with a UI, and Android's multi-tasking Java based applications take a good 1-3 seconds to do anything I tell them to do. If there's any chance Apple would have impacted their UI performance to enable multi-tasking, I think they made a great move.
I still wouldn't switch from an Android to an iPhone because of the restrictions (and I'm not going to wager hundreds of dollars on a jailbreak), but now I see why people enjoy Apple products.
For most users multi-tasking is a secondary concern to a nice UI.
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Apple's decision to not include multitasking from the start was likely a decision to keep things as simple as possible. Now they're playing catch-up and tacking on multi-tasking to a system that w
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I think Steve Jobs was just waiting for CPU/memory/battery capacity to catch up to the point where multitasking will be smooth enough that he's happy with it. He's a control freak and a perfectionist, and if something doesn't work just right, he'd rather omit it altogether than include an inferior implementation. That's why Copy & Paste took so long to arrive on iPhone OS.
I'm still using an original 2G iPhone, and I'm wondering whether iPhone OS 4.0 will be able to run on my device. Steve might decide t
SMS on a land line? (Score:2)
You've got a phone with SMS & web browsing capabilities, and you want a chat client?
As I understand it, you can't SMS to or from a U.S. land line. Nor can you SMS to someone who primarily uses AIM, Windows Live Messenger, EFnet IRC, or Freenode IRC.
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