A blessing and a curse, multi-tasking will force iPhone owners to rethink the way they use their phone.
The blessings of multi-tasking are pretty obvious - finally the iPhone can walk and chew gum at the same time. The ability to run third-party applications in the background brings the iPhone iOS 4 into line with other mobile operating systems such as Android and Windows Mobile. This is particularly useful for communications-based apps such as Skype and Fring, which can now sit in the background and listen for incoming calls. iPhone OS 3 had already taken steps in this direction by allowing background push notifications to launch apps when required, mimicking multi-tasking whilst not chewing through a lot of extra resources behind the scenes.
Of course this touches on the curse of multi-tasking - it ties up your processor and RAM, plus it drains your battery faster. The tricky thing for iPhone 4 owners (and 3G S owners who have upgraded the iOS 4), is that the iPhone seems to leave everything running in the background. This can be very bad news for your battery life, especially if a sat-nav app is still running behind the scenes.
The issue is reminiscent of my old hassles with Windows Mobile, especially before the rise of third-party task managers and better app management. Closing an app didn’t really shut it down, which seemed quite unintuitive in the day. Rather than battery life, it was memory that was in short supply and Windows Mobile phones regularly slowed to a crawl, requiring you to dig through the menus to kill off apps or restart the phone to free up RAM.
Anyway, now it seems iPhone owners - used to lording it over the WinMo crowd in terms of user-friendliness - will be forced to go back to that WinMo mindset of keeping track of which apps are running in the background. That’s a major shift in thinking for anyone who has been using an iPhone for two or three years.
Thankfully Apple has built a task manager into the iPhone, just double-tap the home button and the dock moves up to reveal icons for currently running apps. Scroll right to see them all, or scroll left to see the iPod control icons.
Some people seem to think that the list of apps in the iPhone task manager is merely a list of shortcuts to recently used apps, but it’s easy to see what’s actually running in the background using the impressive
iStats system monitoring app. It would seem a sensible investment for anyone wanting to really study how multi-tasking affects their phone. Apple forced the developers to remove the feature displaying how much free RAM your iPhone has, which is typical of Cupertino’s obsessiveness with locking things down.
It seems that every app continues to run in the background once you’ve used it, from third-party apps such as Skype, Fring and TomTom sat-nav to native apps such as Mobile Safari, Maps and even the Calculator and Weather apps. This seems like overkill to me and you’d think Apple would at least configure the Calculator and Weather apps to actually shut down when you close them. Instead you need to tap and hold an icon in the task manager, which pops up a red line which can be tapped to kill the app. This isn’t how the iPhone behaved in the past, judging by iStats running on my iPhone 3G (which is upgraded to iOS 4 but lacks multi-tasking). If I open and close Mobile Safari it stays running in the background on the 3G, but the Calculator and Weather apps don't behave this way.
Some background apps are actually suspended and stored in RAM, so they don’t chew up CPU cycles or battery life. The phone can then shut down apps automatically if it needs to free up some RAM. My understanding is that iStat displays running processes, so if I can see the Calculator app listed, for example, then it’s chewing through CPU cycles and thus battery life.
It seems you need to manually kill every application you open, so it doesn’t take long for you to accumulate a long list of running applications. Even a reboot doesn’t fix the problem, as the iPhone seems to automatically relaunch many of the apps that were running in the background. This is where things become confusing. When you reboot the phone, Fring, Skype and TomTom all appear in the task manager yet, when I check iStats, it appears Fring and Skype are running but TomTom isn’t. So sometimes an icon in the task manager means that app is running, and sometimes it means that you’ve used it recently.
Sat-nav apps will probably put the biggest drain on your battery. A good rule of thumb is to always finish navigating and exit to the menus before closing your sat-nav app. If you can still see the navigation arrow alongside the battery indicator, the sat-nav app is still using GPS and hammering your battery. Even then some people still seem to be having battery problems, so you should get into the habit of killing your sat-nav apps using the task manager.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple hones the way multi-tasking works, perhaps shutting down some apps after a certain period of inactivity or popping up a warning if a battery-hogging app is still running. The ability to adjust the multi-tasking options for each app would be very handy. Another solution might be to add a button to some applications which actually kills the app, rather than just hiding it in the background. Of course Apple is unlikely to permit such as thing - as it draws attention to the phone’s shortcomings. The Jobsian answer from Apple will be “the phone is perfect, just change the way you use it”.
I suspect multi-tasking is going to cause iPhone owners some grief for a while, until they get back into the mindset of keeping in mind what’s running in the background. If Apple wasn’t so anal about what iPhone apps can and can’t do, there would be a great opportunity here for an app developer to create a great task manager and multi-tasking configuration tool.
By Adam Turner