Later this month, Microsoft will most likely unveil Windows Mobile 7 Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress. Rumours abound, and the latest set of rumours paint a rather dramatic turnaround for Microsoft’s mobile platform – no more multitasking, application distribution limited to official channels, and a whole lot more.
It’s no secret that Windows Mobile is in a rather dark place right now. Once quite popular and (after installing a number of third party tools) relatively usable in its day (i.e., the days of the stylus), it was quickly superseded by the iPhone OS, and things like Android and webOS are ahead of Windows Mobile as well – if not in market share, then in user experience.
For a while now, people have been wondering why Microsoft doesn’t just tack phone capabilities onto its Zune operating system and interface; especially the Zune HD and its software have been very well received in the press. The rumour du jour, too, states that we’re going to see a ‘Zune phone’. The details are… Interesting.
Different websites independently published the exact same rumour, but whether that confirms or denies the story is impossible to tell. Let’s get the most intriguing items on the list out of the way first, so we can leave the others for you to read on your own.
Obviously, the big shocker is no multitasking. The rumours states that applications can “pause” instead, but what exactly that entails it doesn’t say. To me, that sounds like quiting the applications but saving their state, so that when you relaunch them, you can continue where you left off. For example, if you were busy editing a Word document, then Pocket Word (or does it have a new name?) would save the state when it quits. If you re-open Word, you would be right back where you left off: cursor in the right place, document properly scrolled/zoomed, etc. Push notifications will be part of the package as well.
Application installation will go through things like the Marketplace alone; so you won’t be able to ‘side-load’ applications onto the device. This seems like a major step backwards to me, but hey, it worked for Apple, right? I doubt this part of the rumour is true – there will probably (hopefully…) be an advanced switch or something.
Even though I didn’t particularly like my time with Windows Mobile, there was one thing it excelled at: expandability. You can do pretty much everything with a Windows Mobile/PocketPC device, and there’s literally an application for everything – including things like browsing network shares of all types, video players that play everything over the network, and what not. It’d be a shame to see that disappear.
Furthermore, even though Microsoft will not come out with a device of its own, it will exercise a lot more control over them. Microsoft sets the minimum requirements and will write all the device drivers, and OEMs are no longer allowed to include custom user interfaces. This effectively means that the software experience on all Windows Phones will be similar. It also enables over-the-air updates, so you’re no longer dependent on manufacturers for providing updates. In other words, Microsoft wants better QA.
The interface is called “Metro”, and is supposedly “very clean”, “soulful”, and “alive” – whatever that means. It will borrow heavily from the Zune HD, and come with a completely revamped Start screen. At MWC, this is exactly what we’ll see: the interface.
Other tidbits include full Xbox Live integration, a “fast” browsing experience using a browser that is a mesh of IE7 and IE8 (oh boy…*), doesn’t come with Flash (for now), Silverlight is only available outside of the browser, Zune software will take care of syncing, and a whole load of more details. Apparently, we will be surprised by how far ahead Windows Phone 7 is. The first devices are expected to ship by September 2010.
* If you get that “oh boy” reference, than you really know your foreign cinema. Unless you’re Swedish, of course – in which case it’s just cinema.
Well, no multitasking might not be too bad, seeing as how windows mobile never did get it right in the first place. Improper multitasking (no way to really close an app without a task manager) was one of winmo’s greatest flaws, since apps would run away and could drain your battery within an hour if you weren’t careful.
Hopefully they don’t go down the iPhone’s route with their app-store knock-off, though it wouldn’t surprise me if they did. Microsoft do like to copy, but in this case what works for Apple is likely to backfire on them.
No custom UI? No carrier branding? Woohoo! Finally! That’s one thing I like about the iPhone is that carriers can’t send the os to hell with their crapware. Over-the-air updating would be good too.
Zune software required though? NO way. No frigging way. Gimme ActiveSync and all the compatibility (with OS X and Linux software) that implies. Gimme MTP support with all of its compatibility too. We don’t need another iTunes ecosystem.
This should be interesting to see just how accurate (or not) these rumors turn out to be.
Skype is a waiting application; if I may. Unless one is calling out, Skype sit in the background and waits for a call in. Any number of programs could be called waiting applications for the same reason.
Something I noticed with the Iphone. One can install and use Skype but only when in the foreground. Skype can’t be left running in the background due to lack of multi-tasking. Something that should be a background service waiting for calls in must be treated as a dedicated service only available for contact when it’s in the foreground. (I’d like to be corrected on this if I’m wrong)
When I’m traveling, I’ll remain available by Skype regardless of what I’m doing in the foreground on my PDA. My wife will only be available by Skype when expecting a call in so I have to pay to text message or phone before I can use a free phone like connection.
This same type of problem will likely exist on Windows phones if they deliver it without multitasking.
Enter push notification.
This sort of problem can be solved. Multitasking the whole app is just not practical on a mobile device.
What Microsoft (and Apple too) need to do is provide a global event queue that apps can subscribe to. The phone would maintain a single TCP persistent connection for the phone to Microsoft/Apples servers, and the app developer can ping those servers to send packets to a user’s phone. When the message arrives at the phone the app it’s addressed to is started with a message parameter that acts on the message.
In the example of Skype, Skype would send a message to the phone via Microsoft/Apple’s servers and the phone would launch Skype in the background and Skype would see that the message means an incoming call and that the app should load fully and handle this.
This way apps do not have to be running in the background at all, they are merely queried in the background when a message comes in and then decide if it wants to load the UI and start fully.
Effective multi-tasking on phones is just an API problem, that’s all.
The only example I can think of that would be difficult is background media (like music players), but again this is just an API problem. If the OS has a decent media API that doesn’t leave the app to do the decoding then the App can just hand the file to the media APIs in the OS and it can continue to play the song even when the app is closed.
I totally believe that Microsoft are doing the right thing, and I totally believe Apple have been struggling to come up with a multi-tasking system that doesn’t compromise on their design.
Heck, employee me Microsoft, I just solved two problems just like that and it’s taken Apple years and notifications are still not working.
It seems to work fine on my Palm Pre. On a Palm Pre Plus, it can even multitask so many that I’m not sure if *your brain* can do so much multitasking. 😉
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/21/palm-pre-plus-shows-off-multitas…
So, what you are describing is pretty much push notifications. This is almost exactly how they work for the iPhone. Apple Server sits in the middle, app subscribes to push notifications, developers server pushes notifications to the Apple server which then notifies the user. The only part Apple hasn’t quite got right is the “app opens” part. But is isn;t that simple – you can’t assume the user is not running an app, so the service needs to be able to pop up a message in that case. Apple have not got it completely right, yes, but it does pretty much exactly what you described.
The second section of this concept – launching sub process to decide what the message means – why? You simply define a set of push notifications in your app. The notification holds all the salient info for the end user. This either pops up a message or opens the app – depending on what the phone is doing. (12 days of Christmas app that Apple produced demonstrated this – if you were running an app you got a notification, else it spawned the app.) Why not spawn another process to handle messages? Because that is costly. You either need to farm out all responsibility to the App or the push service on the phone, else there are too many probable clashes going on. If you start the app every time a notification arrives, the performance of the phone will dip. What if you have 200 apps that all receive push notifications and they all get a message pushed at the same time? Who wins? Apple moved the responsibility to a constantly running service, so whilst it might degrade performance occasionally, you aren’t spawning lots of additional processes on a semi regular basis. I’ve never got more than one notification so I’m really not sure what then happens. I doubt it is quite right on the iPhone though.
One could also argue, the push service running on the handset is completely in the control of the vendor, whereas, spawning a misbehaving app might stall the handset, crash the system or corrupt data. If the programmer doesn’t program the app correctly it could fail to close in a timely fashion and drain the battery. Basically – do exactly what you are attempting to avoid.
Edited 2010-02-07 20:57 UTC
EDIT: ^– memson got me for 19 seconds. Oh, well…
Isn’t this exactly what push notifications are? The only difference between what you described and push is that the app doesn’t auto-launch when a notification comes but can do a number of different things, present a badge, present a brief text or present a brief text with a button to launch the app. I think this is better than auto-launching since the user has more control.
Edited 2010-02-07 21:15 UTC
Well, open up to the bare minimum where Apple allows notices for Google Voice, Skype and other applications that compete with there own offerings on the device. The cynic in me thinks that may be asking too much of Apple and Microsoft but we’ll see how MS handles it before final judgement.
Apple continues to be more closed though with the most recent being disallowing the mention that an app had been nominated for an award. Sure the app owner had no issue changing the description but it’s a bit much of an initial reaction from our favorite fruit company.
On my N810, I regularly have more than one application. I’d suggest that’s a slightly different case but given the N900 and WebOS, I think multi-tasking can be managed without destroying battery times. My Palm T5 had great battery life and the approach at that time was to have everything essentially running.
Again, nonsense.
Just look at android. Phones need real multitasking. You just have break programs down into smaller parts, some need to run in the background, some don’t.
But trying to do everything with Apple-like push notifications is very limited not really anything like multitasking.
I want an OS where an app can download something and I can make a phone call or surf the web or whatever.
I want a SSH shell running in the background (don’t tell me that such a thing would draw much power, it wouldn’t), I want a torrent client, I want stream music etc.
Push notifications my ass.
Seems to me you want a laptop. ITS A PHONE! Why the hell would you want a torrent client on a phone?
Well my next phone will be a Nexus One or more powerful with a data flatrate. It has a 1GHz CPU and half a gig of RAM .. why shouldn’t I be able to download a music album of the pirate bay when I travel and I don’t have a laptop with me?
Maybe because it’s illegal…
I only listen to new NIN stuff and that is always CC
Not everything on torrent networks are illegal to download. In fact, I’ve personally downloaded a number of albums where by bit-torrent was part of it’s official distribution chain.
And that’s not even taking into account the numerous European countries where downloading copyrighted content is perfectly legal
Well, not everywherer
Besides, there’s not only copyrighted material on Bittorrent or p2p or whatever.
I’m very happy with my N900 and can do all those things I’ve been reading on this discussion
Seems to me you want a laptop. ITS A PHONE! Why the hell would you want a torrent client on a phone?
Well, a phone is a whole lot smaller and can thus very easily be carried with you wherever you go. Laptops are a lot larger and can’t fit inside a pocket. Oh, and as phones nowadays have 30Gb storage space, or even more, then why not?
Seems to me you want a laptop. ITS A PHONE! Why the hell would you want a torrent client on a phone?
Hello, the nineties called. They want their worldview back.
If it is just a phone, it only needs to make calls. In that case, we could all get $20 handset and be done with it. Even the iPhone is overkill if it is to be just a phone.
The phone as we knew it is dead. These days we carry a connected, personal multifunctional gadget around. One of its functions is communication, be it phone, text, e-mail or social networking.
Windows going off multitasking is a huge step back. It brings WinPho a step closer to being only a phone. MS better hurry and develop a micro-NT and use .NET as the environment on top. If not, I see a very bright future for Android based gadgets.
Your desired features reflect the desires of about 1% of the population.
The only non-sense here is all the people like you that forget that phones are designed for larger subsets of the population.
I want to run my own custom kernel on my phone and plug in a keyboard and plug in my toy robot and whaa whaa whaa give me what I want!
Because only people who compile their own kernel use file sharing or listen to pandora while surfing or whatever ..
99% of mankind is soo stupid and can only cope with one program at a time, but wait … maybe it is just you.
You said you wanted an ssh server and a torrent client on your phone. You actually represent less than 1% or the subset also known as people whose amount of free time far outweighs any ability to make constructive use of it.
Edited 2010-02-08 12:31 UTC
Run your own custom kernel, connect a keyboard and your toy robot..
N900 will allow you to roll your own kernel.. heck, replace Maemo with Debian if you like.. and it has Bluetooth so your keyboard and toy robot are covered. How lucky are you little man?
SSH and bit torrent, I’ll grant you. But streaming audio? That’s a fairly mainstream application.
I use my roommate’s iPod touch to receive an audio stream from my desktop, via an app called FStream. The software I’m using to provide the stream also provides a web-based interface – so the iPod *should* make a decent remote. Except for the fact that the audio playback stops whenever I switch to the browser to use the web interface, which seriously limits the iPod’s usefulness as a remote (and gives me deja-vu for the bad old days of DOS).
That’s probably the single biggest factor that turns me off the iPonne and iPod touch (and presumably the iPad): the paternalistic, “Apple knows best, so you’ll use the device the way we tell you to” attitude.
You can play audio while playing a game or surfing the web. Streaming in the background is supposed to be in the new version:
http://www.intomobile.com/2009/06/16/iphone-os-30-can-stream-intern…
They’re providing a product and the vast majority of the people that use it are satisfied with it.
I’m not a big fan of the Apple way but I do think the iphone is the best smartphone on the market. Sure it comes with limitations but I haven’t found an adequate replacement. I too have my own gripes like not being able to access network error details and I could make use of a Unix prompt as well but I haven’t found a device that I like better.
True, although my understanding is that only applies to the built-in, first-party audio player (FStream is a separate application, it receives AND plays the stream).
That’s cool. I’m a bit surprised that it works with standard ShoutCast/live encoder streams (or so it appears), rather than an end-to-end solution that can only receive streaming audio from iTunes.
I agree with that, and I’m not contending that Apple should bend over backwards to accommodate a small niche. But by preventing the more technically-inclined users from getting under the hood, I think that Apple ultimately harms itself – it’s the geeks and tinkerers who tend to discover new & interesting uses for a device beyond what Apple envisioned (uses which make the devices more compelling/desirable).
If it weren’t for the restrictions, the iPhone is easily the most attractive smartphone available currently. Maybe someone will port Android to the iPhone hardware one of these days.
How about streaming audio and voice navigation? You know, like I do on a regular basis on my Android phone in my car. I suppose if someone else was driving, I could be surfing the web or playing a game too.
Get a Nokia N900
It was practical hardware-wise for me three years ago on the Samsung Blackjack. I kept the email client, SMS client, calendar, and web browser all open at the same time. I could (for example) download an application or stream music while playing a game.
Multitasking is practical on my BlackBerry 8700c. The main applications are constantly running and loaded into RAM. The phone’s uptime is 18 months (without rebooting or power cycling), and it’s more responsive than my iPhone 3G or the WM devices I used to use.
This limits the functionality of “background” applications to those who can receive a message over the network and provide desired functionality. It prevents applications from being triggered based on location, time, etc., and only works when a network is available, and only for those who are willing to pay for data services.
It also results in the user having to wait for applications to load every time. This is a problem for some iPhone applications.
The problem with multitasking is in the user interface, not the hardware or kernel, at least on WM and BlackBerry devices.
That is how it works on the iPhone with push notification (Starting with 3.0). It works well and is probably the best solution. The iPhone does support multitasking for system services.
As of 3.0 you can use push notifications. Push can post a text message, increment a counter on the app icon and make a sound. Some apps do launch on notification. The CNN app is one example.
zune software is kick ass. I’m not kidding. There is nothing wrong with it.
IE6?
IE6 what?
Zune 4 does not use IE6 rendering.
The browser on the Zune is not exactly WebKit is it.
OP’s talking about the Zune software, not the browser of the ZuneHD. The Zune software that runs on your PC.
My bad. What’s odd though is the multi-player strategy. Why doesn’t Zune use WMP? Why don’t MS ditch WMP and switch to Zune player instead? And when will they add podcasts!?
the Zune SOftware is better than WMP and MS will be replacing WMP with the zune software in the next version of windows.
As to podcasts… Zune software supports podcasting already. It is very good at it actually.
Edited 2010-02-07 22:28 UTC
Is the Zune desktop software required to interact with the Zune device and will there be versions of it release for Linux based systems and osX?
It is required.
There might be one released for OS X, since windows Phone users might own a mac, but I doubt they will care about Linux… at least… not any more than Apple cares about Linux.
Well then I simply won’t be buying one, period. I’ve had enough lock-in. Thanks but no thanks, though a step backward like this isn’t at all shocking coming from ms.
Have to ask though, how do you know? So far, these are all just rumors. You seem so certain, somehow… curious minds might suspect why your posts are always pro-ms and anti everything else…
The release for OS X is speculation based on what would be good business sense and taking into account MSs behavior over the last few years regarding their non-windows units.
I am not so much pro MS as I am not Anti-MS.
Regarding the lock in… The zune is not competing with cheap MP3 players, it is competing with the iPod.
Generally, if you’r competing with something it’s a bad idea to exactly copy it. I would think that using the Zune software, but also leaving it open via MTP for the software of the user’s choice, would actually give ita competitive advantage. Those who don’t care will simply use Zune software, and those who do will use what they want. These days it does seem like MS is trying to pull an Apple out of their hat however.
“Regarding the lock in… The zune is not competing with cheap MP3 players, it is competing with the iPod.”
That seems backwards. Not competing with lower cost media players somehow justifies a higher lockin? One would think that the benefits of lockin would justify a lower price point for the device bringing the hardware down into competitive range with the cheaper players while undercutting the high cost, high lockin Apple devices. Either way, I’m not sure how “competing with the Ipod” justifies imposing restrictions on the consumer.
It is the eco system.
Well, Zune software has one glaring issue in my case… it’s Windows only. So it’s not awesome from where I’m standing, quite the contrary in fact. In broader point though, I’m sick of being tied down to *one* music software. Just use the mtp or MSC protocols and let me use whatever damn software *I* want to use so long as it supports the protocol. iTunes is bad enough, next phone I get will not be tied to one application for use no matter how awesome that program supposedly is.
But then again, judging by your posts, *anything* that is made by Microsoft is kick ass to you whether it’s actually any good or not.
Actually you could close apps in WinMobile, it just was not obvious, but I like it nowadays more the way Android does it. Simply let a task killer take care of. I really like the way the internal android task killer handles it.
Application inactive, deep freeze it, ram becomes scarce, garbage collect the non used long open applications. I used to use the usual stuff coming from WinCE, the first I did was to install a third party task killer, but after a while I learned it is not needed and now have been running for weeks without it, performance was the same, and battery life improved actually because there was no background process constantly polling the task list.
With the Zune software comes the Zune library.
The itunes ecosystem exists because it gives people a convenient way to buy music and movies. Activesync and MTP don’t provide a movie rental system.
You mean it exists because it gives Apple a convenient way to tie the customer to Apple while making money on content.
You’ve outlined exactly why I’d never buy a Zune (assuming they eventually sell it in New Zealand one day) let alone a phone with their phone operating system – people bitch and whinge about the so-called ‘closed ecosystem’ of the iPod/iTunes and yet completely ignore the fact that Microsoft has created something even worse – you can’t even use it with non-Microsoft operating systems!
I’m truly amazed when I hear Windows fanboys jumping around with pom-poms of how great it is that they have the illusion of choice; you can have any phone as long as it is running the same operating system. Reminds me of the spam skit form Monty Python.
Why do more important actual news items constantly be degraded to Page 2 articles and rumors like this one gets a Page 1 spot?
Because you don’t contribute. You can’t expect me to know everything about everything. If you want an item on the front page, feel free to submit a decent item about it.
This isn’t rocket science.
And that’s the justification to put pure rumors on Page 1?
congratulations your crusade paid off. No more page 1 and page 2
You call a single comment a crusade? Interesting….
Page 2 means that the editor had no additional knowledge or opinion to attach to the item. It does not mean it is less important.
The way to keep important things off of page 2 is for users to write articles about them. Even 100 words would do. The editors here don’t know everything about every subject and that’s the only reason stuff goes onto page 2.
Knowledge is important to writing/blogging – whoa, me head is spinning. What a novel idea!
Oh sorry, I forgot—I’m not young enough to know everything
That’s OK, I’m old and I do know everything.
But rumors are less important.
OK, it didn’t really work in the past, but Phones like the Pre+ show that you can run 50+ apps without problems.
I think Android has be technically the best concept for phone multitasking. Programs only ask for “intents” and the OS manages how much power they can use. It may not be perfect yet, but it is real multitasking. The UI is just lacking atm.
Palms WebOS has the UI right, but it is lacking technically.
It is 2010, having multitasking on a phone so that you can listen to Pandora while texting etc is no magic.
And if you have an application store you can check programs whether they behave when multitasked.
It really isn’t witchcraft.
PS. I only like the update policy.
I have a feeling MS will go the iPhone route and have two threads, one for the phone features and one for the applications.
I think Microsoft really had their copy machines in Redmond running for this one, apparently they thought all of the iPhone’s drawbacks are features! Be prepared to see that they didn’t copy too many of it’s good features though. This is sort of the opposite approach of WebOS, which was to copy what was good about iPhoneOS and not what is bad.
So the iPhone DOES multitask. Just not 3rd party apps.
Of course it does. Just not where it matters.
Oh. Presumably being able to take a call while you are using an app is not something that matters?
Make no mistake, multitasking would be nice, but pretending it is not there where it really matters is delusional. The iPhone would be useless otherwise.
But you can’t take a call *while* using another app, you take that call *at the expense* of that other app. There’s a difference. Once the call is ended, I don’t go back to where I was in the app I was using, ready to pick up again. Instead, the phone app has taken over and I’m in there instead. It’s particularly annoying in apps that don’t save your state, because often you have to take additional steps to get back to what you were doing if, that is, what you were doing is still there in the first place.
And the Palm Pre taught us that as well. As has Windows Mobile and Android (on the Droid and Nexus One). Running things in the background has a very serious impact on your battery life.
A better solution is to have limited Multi-Tasking. A set of APIs and Notifications that allow very limited background processing. Any numnut can do multi-tasking on a phone. It is not a technical challenge from a software standpoint. It is not even a UI issue. It is a serious technical challenge, however, to make sure when people are doing background tasks, they still get 10-15 hours of battery life.
Older Windows Mobile phones and PDAs didn’t seem to have any battery issues when multitasking, nor did my Symbian phone. I have all of those devices (WinMob PDA, WinMob phone, Symbian phone) and all of them do multitasking just fine without affecting the battery life too much.
If it is so simple it justifies asking how Palm got it so wrong with WebOS then doesn’t it…
Yup. My guess it’s simply the age of the platform. It’s only been on the market for 7-8 months. Windows CE and Symbian are A LOT older than that.
You might be right, as Palm has updated WebOS over time (8 updates since introduction) battery life has improved. I only have to recharge once a day now, whereas before, if I used it heavily it would barely last 7 hours. Of course, now that I have a touchstone, as long as I can come home to it, it is not a big deal to keep it charged anymore. 🙂
Could be the ridiculously tiny 1150 mAh battery that was weak in a Centro, and would be pathetic in any modern smartphone, multitasking or not. Cortex-A8 ain’t exactly the most power-efficient, compared to XScale or especially Qualcomm’s single-chip ARM11 stuff.
Edited 2010-02-08 13:18 UTC
Nonsense, a well programmed Android app has no serious impact on battery life.
Sure it uses a little more power than no apps, but is not serious.
I have a HTC Touch Diamond 2 and the thing goes for days no matter how many apps are running or not.(It has a very big battery though)
That is a myth that only the Apple lemmings believe.
A browser window in the background chugging an errant javascript ad will use more power than one that has been forced to pause.
The OS designer also can’t expect all applications to be designed with efficiency in mind.
The OS designer also needs to take typical usage into account. The tasks performed by the typical mobile user don’t require true multitasking. Concurrent processing is more beneficial on the desktop.
Maybe you should wait for an explanation before calling people lemmings.
The explanation to me is clear. Less complexity, less cost to develop and maintain.
Most users will (initially) accept that the phone only does one thing at the time, because that is all what the phone can do.
The problem with limited multitasking will start to appear when the competition starts doing wonderful stuff dependent on multitasking and the end users starts to ask why his single third party thread phone can’t do the same neat tricks.
A webbrowser developed for Android would stop/pause its displaying activity and therefor stop the JS.
Read more about Activities, Services, Content providers, Broadcast receivers and Intents here:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html
Oh but it will continue background processing? You can’t get around the basic fact that a forced pause is more efficient than constant polling and a bunch of logic routines to determine if a sub-process is worthy of executing.
Would you expect a page to load in the background on a multitasking machine? Well that’s a power hit right there. I’m not sure why you have such a hard time with the idea of mutitasking having a trade-off.
Either you can’t read or you don’t want to. I never said I want to run a ssh server on my phone. I want a client shell ..
And you also didn’t read or understand the link I provided.
A page load would be a content provider and its impact on battery life is so minimal that the benefits far outweigh its costs.
And with this I will stop responding to your uninformed comments, which seem to be based entirely on marketing material.
You have to admit that it was quite funny, running a ssh server on a phone
.
More seriously, this is the kind of fallacy I refer to when geeks think phones are computers. And you still can only do so badly those geek things with a phone. Hell, even typing is a pain.
You have to admit that it was quite funny, running a ssh server on a phone
Hmm, then again, why not?
That still puts you in the same sub-1%.
If the user opens a website in a tab but doesn’t visit it, that’s a power cost. If the user leaves a game running that the system has to keep polling, that’s a power cost. Those costs add up and Apple engineers have decided that the benefits do not outweigh the costs for the typical user.
Why do you think the iphone doesn’t have multitasking for user apps? Because the system is incapable of it? It’s derived from OSX.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_OS
It’s an engineering decision that prioritizes power efficiency over being able to run applications concurrently.
Hmm.. what does “f–king Ã…mÃ¥l” have to do with IE7/8 and “oh boy” ? It’s a good/interesting (and slightly old) movie but I don´t see what teenage girls growing up have to do with IE7/8. Is it some sort of central/western european thing?
Thom, sometimes your mind amazes me
The final scene (which, coincidentally, I find one of the best scenes in cinematic history). Check it out, and listen to the Swedish. You might get it.
It is remarkably obscure.
If the point is what I think it is, “remarkably obscure” is too mildly put
Comparing the blend of IE7/8 with too much chocolate vs. too little milk cannot possibly be your point. This is too obscure to be true :p
Hah, you’re taking it too far – forget the IE bit, it’s just about the “oh boy”.
And yeah, in the final scene they drink… o’boy. However, if you don’t speak Swedish, you’ll most likely miss that they’re drinking o’boy, because it doesn’t show up in the subtitles.
The only reason I know is because I talked to a number of Swedes about this film, and they consistently referred to that scene as “the o’boy scene”.
O’boy is a swedish product based on chocolate and sugar distributed in the form of a powder which you mix with milk and drink. A common practice is to saturate the milk with O’boy in order to create a kind of sugar bomb.
The brand is quite integrated into the Swedish mentality.
Obviously you foreign folks have never seen Quantum Leap! (That’s what *I* think of when I hear, “Oh boy.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096684/quotes
The way multitasking is described in this article is exactly how it works on android. Each application can pause and save it’s state while the use is doing something else. It is then resumed when the user goes back to it via the backstack.
The next part of the puzzle is background process (called services) which run whatever the user is doing. These are used for things like playing music, downloading applications in the market and whatever else.
There are also push notifications which are used in combination with services to generate notifications for the user to action on.
Overall i love how it works and it would be brilliant if Microsoft did something similar and would work perfectly.
Look at iPhone, the APIs allow the apps/games to save it’s state or ‘pause’ and when you return to the app it can then continue.
a lot of apps have this already, it works great.
Except that they can’t really do shit in the background (play streaming music or download something). On Android they can
Why don’t all the Iphone fanboys don’t get that multitasking is a Good Thing(tm)
I have read so many brainless nonsense today “that nobody needs multitasking on a phone” and “that this a good decision” bla bla
Utter nonsense .. phones get more powerfull every 6 months and become more and more real computers.
And real computers need REAL multitasking.
And once IphoneOS ships with real multitasking all the same people will crawl out of the woodwork and hail the JesusPhone and God Jobs.
Pathetic!
Why don’t all the Iphone fanboys don’t get that multitasking is a Good Thing(tm)
Multitasking just happens to be one of those things that makes sense for some people, and for others it doesn’t.
I personally would never ever even think about buying a smartphone without multitasking capabilities, I use it for way too many things and having no multitasking would seriously hamper what I can do on the phone. And yes, I do say it’s bullsh*t that the battery goes empty somehow miraculously much faster when you’re running multiple apps compared to when you’re running a single one; I have experienced absolutely no indication of such myself. Ever. A well-written mobile app will defer drawing the screen and all such actions while in the background but will keep the core logic running and as such will not actually take much CPU time. No CPU time == no battery power spent.
It depends on how you use the phone, I assume the iPhone kernel has some deficits of putting running tasks to sleep (no task manager doing different steps). The android kernel and task manager is apparently quite sophisticated in this regard and I also do not see too much difference in battery drain between running only a handful of apps or switching them constantly.
But one thing is true, an app constantly polling something can do serious damage to battery life. In my HTC hero the UMTS chip seems to be the biggest battery consumer (more than anything else) so if you have an app in the background like certain multi platform messengers constantly polling the line battery usage goes down big time.
I almost only use them when I need them and just keep gtalk online (which behaves way less aggressive)
Also I killed off Advanced Task killer from my list which also is a big battery sucker due to constantly polling the task list.
But once you have identified those programs and avoid them multitasking on a phone is really nice. Pushing browsers into the background for long loading tasks while doing some reading, starting an mp3, pushing it into the background starting the navigation program etc… incoming call nothing else stops.
The OS designer isn’t responsible for the applications and the application designer isn’t responsible for ensuring power efficiency.
Not only that but you have a web browser that is processing sub-programs that it has no control over. Part of the problem with allowing multi-tasking on a portable device is that it allows the user to put a cpu-intensive website in the background when the user likely wouldn’t have cared if the processing was paused.
It’s a trade-off decision based upon typical usage.
Maybe the catch here is that phones ARE NOT real computers.
They may have powerful processors and gigabytes of RAM, but they are not real computers, not conceptually, not in their intended usage, and not in what people use phones for.
I seriously dislike the trend where people consider using a phone as computing. Computing is not just pushing buttons. It has to be something more.
They may have powerful processors and gigabytes of RAM, but they are not real computers, not conceptually, not in their intended usage, and not in what people use phones for.
How come?
How do you define what a computer is, for example? A machine that can run various kinds of applications, accepts input, produces output..A computer doesn’t necessarily need to have a full-size screen or keyboard to be a computer, nor does having a DVD-drive define something as being a computer. So, how do you actually define that a smartphone is not a computer? Just because it’s smaller? Even there, small computers have always existed. The smallest ones are even smaller than current smartphones. Or some other odd criteria?
And about their intended usage…well, smartphones ARE intended to be used like computers! That’s the whole point of them: they are more than phones. Buy a phone if you want a phone, buy a smartphone if you want a computer in phone form-factor! Nokia N900 is one of the best recent examples here: it runs a full Linux system, it allows you to tinker with more or less anything…and, most of all, it is literally marketed as a computer with phone capabilities, not vice versa!
Oh, and what about the usage of such phones? How can you define what phones should be able to do and what not? In the beginning phones were used only for making calls or answering them. Nothing else whatsoever. Then came SMS. Answering machine. Games. Browser. Cameras. Music players. Who are you to define where the limit goes? People happen to use phones for almost everything the phone is capable of, that’s a fact. One person might not use all the capabilities, whereas another might use a whole different set of them.
Now, you might want to think a bit next time before blathering away without any point whatsoever.
I am too tired today to formulate a coherent idea.
But I’ll start by saying that I view this more as a cultural phenomenon.
A computer scientist may derive the concept of a computer from the things you mentioned; input, output, processing unit, Turing, and so forth. I am not trying to argue against those things. Heck, even my microwave is probably a computer by a some standard.
The keyword here is the word computing. Indeed what I am after is something like computing as a verb. The etymology here probably goes to such things as count, calculate, derive, compute, and so on. CS students, feel free to add your own jargon of computability, and whatnot.
No they are not. Their intended usage is related more to the status of a toy. (Besides, what the companies want is that we have a PC, smart phone, e-book reader, tablet, and five to ten other gadgets.)
The irony here is that people have indeed used phones for almost anything these are capable except computing, as a verb. Listening music or playing games should not qualify as “computing”, IMO. Even in normal day to day language the verb “computing” does not refer to those things. Instead, using Excel might.
I see that all this leads eventually to “computing” as a passive act, very much like watching television; you push the buttons of the remote and call it computing. Equivalently, you access the Cloud, push the buttons in your Facebook page, and call it computing. You take your e-book reader and call it computing.
The end result is the demise of computing. Add the blig and commercialization of the web, and you have the future.
And an idiot box as a machinery.
I did it again
.
Do I taste computing to be an elite kind of scientific number crunching? Then by your definition nobody (except a few scientist) does computing. The rest is using ever more capable commercial idiot boxes.
Idiot boxes who become more useful with multitasking, by the way.
Not really.
Generally the things people do with Personal Computers qualify just fine as computing. Writing Word documents. Unlike pushing buttons in an idiot box.
Not really
Edited 2010-02-08 12:54 UTC
The keyword here is the word computing. Indeed what I am after is something like computing as a verb. The etymology here probably goes to such things as count, calculate, derive, compute, and so on. CS students, feel free to add your own jargon of computability, and whatnot.
The irony here is that people have indeed used phones for almost anything these are capable except computing, as a verb. Listening music or playing games should not qualify as “computing”, IMO.
By that definition PCs aren’t computers either; very few people actually use their PCs for more than entertainment or browsing the web. Then again, many smartphone users do actually indeed write and study on their phones. If writing a text document counts as “computing” then so equally does f.ex. writing a blog entry, and then a lot of smartphone users actually do “compute”.
I personally think your definition of computing is very bizarre and very limited.
No they are not. Their intended usage is related more to the status of a toy. (Besides, what the companies want is that we have a PC, smart phone, e-book reader, tablet, and five to ten other gadgets.)
Again, no different from desktop PCs and laptops; more often than not they are advertised based on their entertainment capabilities and that is nowadays their intended usage. You still apparently count them as computer even despite their intended usage. So, how are smartphones any different?
This reminds me on the early 90s when Microsoft came out with Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1 while IBM tried to sell OS/2 over its apparently extremly well done multitasking capabilities. The main stream press back then wrote articles like “Why one task is enough” or “Why you will never need multitasking”. History repeats itself just from a different angle.
And again users believe the stupidity spouted out by various marketing departements which only try to hide the deficits of an implementation by marketing blur!
The problem with WinCE never was the multitasking itself but its lousy execution of task freezing and killing. But generally users loved multitasking.
Actually I know a fair share of people who unlocked their iPhones for exactly that reason they simply hated the semi single task approach apple forced them in. I am sure now that Android is seriously impacting the sales of the iPhone Apple will rethink its strategy, probably by copying Androids task handling approach (also Widgets will probably come soon I think the pogram startbar user interface is a joke, that thing screams for Android like widgets)
Or maybe Apple’s engineers:
1. Looked at what people do with their phones
2. Decided that for the average person having true multitasking was not worth the decrease in battery life.
It’s a design trade-off.
Maybe you should try to calm down and remember that:
1. Their primary use is a phone
2. Their secondary use is mobile computing
3. The vast majority of the people that have them are satisfied with the performance. The biggest complaint is with the carrier.
Have you even used an iphone? People are not plugging keyboards into them and then trying to load Word and switch between a dozen browser tabs while downloading an ISO file. They talk on the phone and then maybe play peggle or browse a blog at a coffee shop. You’re really taking this issue way too seriously.
The phone feature of my iPhone is rarely used.
I use mine for e-mail, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook and games.
The lack of multitasking for 3rd party apps doesn’t bother me. The only thing I would like to run in the background is an IM app or Skype (which is also part IM app). It seems most people only want multitasking to stream music in the background.
I don’t view my iPhone as a computer, but I can do a lot with it I’d previously used a “real” computer for.
Well, for a lot of young people (and older young people) the phone part is secondary, the internet is the primary reason they have a smartphone with a dataplan. They want for example to run a IM app or skype or stream music in the background ALL THE TIME.
A well designed OS makes that possible(read up on the link I provided above.)
Edited 2010-02-08 12:22 UTC
You can already play music in the background. It’s a tiny minority that that wants to run 2 applications in addition to that. Apple’s engineers have limited its multitasking capabilities intentionally as a power saving measure.
And I want virtual desktops for my phone. Yeah, right.
You know what? Multitasking is not even needed for the vast majority of PC users!
LOL, so all the windows boxes on this planet should only be able to run a virus scanner? Nothing else?
Sad but true. Cooperative multitasking ala early Windows would do just fine.
I really hope such news are not reliable.
Should those be true, that’s a very giant leap backward for Windows Mobile platform. They’ve taken all the bad features from Apple and surrendered all good features. No multitasking? What the …? No open platform? That’s simply crazy…
we are paying for the success of the iphone and the hate for windows CE (which is quite deserved )
Windows Mobile. Don’t swap the names they’re not the same OS (though at least at some point Mobile was built out of CE, probably still is now). Windows CE is actually a fair player in the RTOS field
To me “oh boy” is a quote from Red Dwarf (episode terrorform).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorform
Come on, guys! Zune Phone has been in the making for quite a while already:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRLRjKCGHek
The initial rumor of Zune integration into WinMo 7 has already been cemented by Steve Balmer in a recent video. This is actually a good move.
I have a HTC Tilt 2 with WinMo 6.5 on it and the software is very stable and reliable. If WinMo 7 is as stable and has a Zune interface, it will only get better. I have yet to come by any firm mention as to the phone specs that will be need to support WinMo 7, so who knows if new devices will be needed or if upgrading some present devices will be possible.
I also have a Zune HD and I’m truly impressed with the quality of both the device and the Zune HD software. To put it mildly, I was actually astonished by the quality and elegance of the device itself.
My daughter has an iPod Touch and when we compared the two devices side-by-side, she asked me, ‘Wanna trade?’ And she meant it. To her, the Zune HD has a better, ‘feel,’ and the s/w is incredibly simple. She loved it. But she can keep her iPod Touch.
I voted you back up since I don’t think you should lose points for having a positive view of a Microsoft product.
Of course you wouldn’t have lost any points if you had slammed the Zune with a childish insult.
Just call it a wPhone and be done with it ….
no multi tasking? i doubt it. WinCE has multitasking, windphone is based on that.
do you somehow think MacOSX which iphone uses (or ‘iPhone OS’) doesn’t support multitasking? Or maybe the hardware doesn’t?
it’s a limitation imposed to preserve battery power and offer fast performance to the current running app.
As long as Windows Mobile allows me to tether my phone to my netbook on the $30/month data plan, and install whatever apps I want, im happy.
P.S. a little irony that my phone runs windows, but my netbook runs Ubuntu…
Edited 2010-02-08 04:40 UTC
Sometimes I wish Microsoft would get further into hardware. I love my Microsoft mouse, and I have several Microsoft Wireless cards – they work well under Linux and BSD (and Windows 7, even though they are old). I’ve heard good things about the Zune, and the 360 is very popular.
The ONLY home use Wifi routers/APs that ever lasted were two cheap as nails Microsoft one’s I picked up on closeout sale from Target for $20/ea. They are now over 5+ years old and still in operation. On the other hand I have yet to see a single D-Link last for more than a year. My brother purchased a Linksys last October that failed a month later. I think the obvious reason is that as a non-hardware producer they have more freedom to select and choose which products they will have manufactured for them to put their label on. So in essence we are actually better off having them sparingly contract out hardware production than being a full time producer. I don’t know who they use now, but the original MS optical mice were contracted out to Logitech to produce.The irony of course was that the MS mice produced by Logitech were better in quality than the Logitech branded ones due to tighter QA controls by MS.
Not sure which D-Link routers you have been using but here a DIR-655 has been working now almost for three years flawlessly (I wish I could say the same for my superior but more flakey Airport Extreme)
Maybe it is the plug or generally your electricity lines, flakey electricity can kill electronics equipment.
I also recommended the same router to other people and have yet to see one of those failing.
This is quite contrary to what I got from Netgear, I had all, flakey firmware, failing hardware, but never with D-Link.
And some of their keyboards are really nice too.
Microsoft keyboards and mice are pretty good, but MS doesn’t actually make those… The 360 has well-known problems (“red ring of death”, where it overheats and dies, often with ordinary usage), I’m on my second one now, and the average failure rate of the 360 is over 40%.
If there was one thing that annoyed the heck out of me while I had a Windows Mobile was having to go to settings and fire up the task manager to close down apps beause the phone was getting sluggish. So I think that is the right descision. My iPhone doesn’t multitask, but it is *never* slow.
I think iPhone could take one thing from the Windows Mobile-book. The home screen. Abselutely wonderfull way of getting information at glance. I don’t understand why Apple haven’t implemented something like this into the locked screen, it’s sort of useless right now.
No more multitasking, restricted apps, unified and default-only user interface. Yeap, it’s a good time for other mobile platforms to fully kick WM out of the market.
Jailbreaks for WM? No way.
I’m sure that for every restriction there will be a new “jailbreak”. Firmware will be hacked to give the user a freedom of device usage. Not all of us want to use device only from A to Z, where both A and Z are defined by software, not hardware, restrictions.
Hardware defines the possibilities, we need software only to have an ability to use this hardware efficiently and friendly. If not, it’s a bad software.
No multitasking? I, user, know that some apps take more battery life than another. I’m able to plan a battery life of my device. If software plans it instead of me and I don’t have the ability to disable this feature and to enjoy the full device power, it’s a bad software. If the cable is plugged in, there is no need for such restricted behaviour.
And one thing more about multitasking: modern browsers execute scripts, plugins, etc. in several processes to ensure stability. Would these browsers be restricted, too, without real multitasking. Will background submits and ajax updates be “frozen” until I switch to proper tab?
Restricted apps? I, user, know that some apps could contain hacker’s code to crack my system. I’m pleased if software vendor recommends some apps that are proved to contain no malicious code, but if software vendor chooses apps instead of me, it’s a bad software platform. One day there will be no recommended app for my special purpose and how do I do in such case?
Unified user interface? Are you sure, dear vendor, that you do better know what I want from my phone environment to look like and to behave? If there is no ability to choose UI that is better for me, it’s a bad software.
*facepalm*
Looks like I’ll be stuck on windows mobile 6.1 on my Treo 800w for awhile.
I’ve tried WebOS and Android and they are OK but I’m still not too thrilled at touch only interfaces (dpad navigation is all but gone on newer phones) and no multitasking? wtf. Why are smart-phones turning into beefed up feature phones?
*sigh*