Can I turn off multitasking?

[cujimmy]

I remember Jobs saying something to the tune of "If you need to have any control over multitasking, then the phone is not doing it properly."

As such, I indeed don't know if/when my phone is multitasking, nor have I seen any difference in battery/performance/app start-up speed since downloading iOS4.

What I have noticed, however, is that I've lost the shortcut to my Favourites and iPod now that double-clicking the home button brings up the multitasking. And I'm really missing them. Can I turn off multitasking or reinstate what double-clicking does?

After all, Steve Jobs himself said that I should never need to know my iPhone is multitasking, so why tie-up such a useful shortcut?

 

[mgamber]

Well, because Jobs is a salesman.

In reality, there are definitely times you'll know the phone is multitasking. For example, if you start an app that uses the GPS and doesn't know when to quit and it burns through 80% of the battery in a couple of hours, you'll know it's multitasking. Or when an app is "updated for multitasking" which also means it doesn't sync properly or in a timely manner with outside data, you'll know it's multitasking. I find myself using the task manager 3 or 4 times a day, sometimes even more, depending on what I've been doing. It's a pain in the ass but every other multitasking phone has one, now the iPhone has one too and it's there because it can't read your mind. To the best of my knowledge multitasking can't be turned off, nor can the task manager function, at least until you can jailbreak the phone and even that's just being hopeful.

Just FYI, you won't notice a slowdown due to multitasking because it's not "real", as in pre-emptive, multitasking. Rather, it's cooperative multitasking like Windows did 15 years ago. Pre-emptive multitasking is where the system controls the CPU and each app gets a time slice. It happens so fast that it appears each app is running simultaneously but in reality, only X number of threads are running where X is how many CPUs you have in the system. Time slices thin as more stuff is run and apps can appear to slow down. Cooperative multitasking is where an app gets full control of the CPU for as long as it needs it and then it gives it back to the system. The system hands it to the next app in the list for as long as it needs it and so on. You can pile on the apps and not notice a slowdown because each still gets full control for as long as it needs it. Although cooperative multitasking sounds "cheap", it's actually not a bad choice for a phone because you can only see one thing at a time anyway.

I really miss double-clicking the home button to bring up the camera.