Multi-Tasking, advantage or disadvantage?

[Demandarin]

Disadvantage - Regardless of what Apple says it WILL lower battery life and will make the iPad run hotter.

Ummm, thats not true at all.

For starters the way apple is doing multitasking is not actually multitasking as we traditionally think of it. It is more like state saving with an NES emulator. You run an app then close it, when you close it it saves a file that says exactly where it was when you closed it (similar to sleep mode on a PC). When you go back to that app the saved state is loaded as opposed to the initial state...therefore the battery life will NOT be hindered at all! The only toll it will take is the addition of small state files taking up more space on the device.

Now on that note. I have been using Backgrounder since the jailbreak came out and that actually runs apps in the background. I have experienced no loss in battery life whatsoever.

I noticed that also. Once i jailbroke my ipad and added backgrounder, battery life is still the same. That being excellent. I have to give it to apple for making the battery life last so long.

 

[wrecklass]

I find myself wishing for it almost every day. If you dont want your iPad multitasking, just dont use it and close everything. Its very nice to have when you need it - it was one of the features I really liked about my old Windows Mobile phone.

I agree, the more I use my iPad vs my Android phone the more it frustrates me that iPad can't flip between Apps without going to the home screen and waiting for the next App to reload. Of course without the Back button on the iPad, I suspect that multitasking will still be frustrating.

 

[gentlefury]

Even if there are no battery life, it will still eat up some ram.

As I understand it, the program state is stored in the SSD, the actual RAM footprint is pretty small for most program which are 'frozen'. I think thats one of the reasons why Apple only provide a few multitasking capable Development modules.

Still, this is a pretty big issue. The iPad has a mere 256MB of RAM for Apps, the same as the iPhone 3GS. The iPhone 4 has double that, 512MB.

This is a pretty big limitation while there are Android phones with up to 8GB (GB!!) of app RAM. This is one of the reasons iOS4 has had such poor performance on iPhone 3 devices. Apple is going to have to jump through some hoops to make this work on the iPad.

It is pretty inexcusable that Apple released iPad with so little RAM just months before releasing iOS4.

What was meant was, it doesn't use the ram, it saves it as a state file....It would be classified as Other in iTunes. It doesn't affect ram at all.

As for Android, you are misinformed. The Droid from verizon for instance has 256 MB of ram and 256MB of app storage. Sure you can have up to 32GB of memory for app data and photos and pics....but you can't put an app on there. So you are actually WAY more restricted with Android. Also, most android phones are not coming with a SSD...they come with small flash memory and a memory card, which is WAY slower than a true SSD.