Thoughts on iPhone multitasking

I followed along some Liveblogging for today's iPhone 4.0 announcement from Apple. I'm glad that they are making logical, iterative changes rather than trying to overhaul the entire iPhone model. This may disappoint people who look for something radically new every few years, but will be welcome news to the mainstream audience who have mastered the use of the iPhone OS and wouldn't necessarily want to start over with whole new operating paradigms.

Most interesting to me was the discussion of multitasking. I must say I'm a bit relieved that Apple is taking a conservative approach to multitasking. Almost a year ago I explained why I wasn't missing multitasking on the iPhone in my Constraints Can Be Beautiful post. I came to this conclusion after a few nasty run-ins with multitasking on a Blackberry I used to use. I installed some third-party applications onto the Blackberry to take advantage of my first phone. Nothing big, a Twitter client, an IM client, and a few other sundry applications. Somewhere along the way the phone reacted badly and for a week every time the phone would ring I would press the answer key and have an hourglass appear for anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes (or until I removed the battery in frustration). Needless to say, I started missing a lot of calls. I tried all sorts of solutions including removing all of the applications but still couldn't seem to get the phone back to stability.

My best guess is that the phone allowed applications to interfere with its core purpose - voice communications. To me that is a complete deal-breaker when it comes to a mobile phone. At that time, I switched to the iPhone and haven't looked back.

That said, I have noticed a few compromises I've accepted in giving up multitasking on my phone. Streaming music applications like Pandora only play when they are open, so I can't do other things and continue to enjoy the music (although the iPod functionality does multitask). The other place where I miss multitasking is in Skype. Because Skype must be open in order to receive calls - and because when a phone call comes in - Skype is currently a suboptimal experience on the iPhone. Steve Jobs called these two use cases out specifically in his presentation of how iPhone OS 4.0 takes on multitasking.

I'm cautiously optimistic that Apple has taken its time to add multitasking to the iPhone in a way that will not seriously compromise the core functionality (and battery life) of the device. They seem to have thought through a number of use cases and have adopted a model which will ensure third party applications won't bring my phone to its knees in some way.