Posted by C at 3:50am Jan 18 '10One of the biggest things that the Motorola Droid commercials touted was the lack of the ability for the iPhone to truly multitask. The iPhone can do some multitasking out of the box but only when it comes to the Apple-made apps, like Phone, Safari, iPod app and Mail but the 3rd party apps are not allowed to run simultaneously.
To only way to get 3rd part app multitasking on the iPhone is to jailbreak it, and install Backgrounder plus optionally, either mQuickPod, Kirikae or the closest thing to that sweet Palm Pre multitasking interface, Multifl0w (a paid Cydia app). Now, Multifl0w was the closest until ProSwitcher (a free app!) and now, there's sweet, sweet, Palm Pre-esque app switching and it works even better than 'Cards' natively, in the WebOS! Let's keep in mind that you can't do voice and data with the Palm Pre on Sprint's network, lol.
The iPhone 3G is a very capable device-- too bad Apple locks it up they way they do. The multitasking probably won't work so smooth on older iPhones but on my iPhone 3G[S] I ran 8 apps at once, and they worked great-- Safari, Pandora, Facebook, Twitterific Premium, Skype (using VOIP pauses the music in Pandora Radio, sound priority of course), Mail, BeejiveIM and Gowalla. No noticeable slowdown, switching was smooth when flicking apps across the screen, and I still had about 32MB of RAM (out of 256MB total) left over. During this time, I was also opening settings and fiddling with the ProSwitcher settings panel and testing interface option which take affect in realtime. All this had a surprisingly low impact on battery life, a lot less than I imagined. I attribute that to the iPhone OS' excellent resource management. The other thing about ProSwitcher, is that it seems to be a lot more stable than Multifl0w.
With the exception of a couple of hardware bonuses, the higher res camera and screens of the droid phones, they don't have nuthin' on an iPhone properly jailbroken and configured.
Another thing that's pretty sweet, is there's a jailbroken app called "My3G" that tricks apps into thinking they're on wifi-- so apps like Skype that are designed to be restricted and only use VOIP on wifi, can be used on the 3G Network (or even Edge) and it works great. There is no other way to use VOIP apps on any mobile phone over 3G :p
Yeah! :D
Here's a video of the early beta of ProSwitcher for iPhone (It's currently released, ver. 1.0):
To only way to get 3rd part app multitasking on the iPhone is to jailbreak it, and install Backgrounder plus optionally, either mQuickPod, Kirikae or the closest thing to that sweet Palm Pre multitasking interface, Multifl0w (a paid Cydia app). Now, Multifl0w was the closest until ProSwitcher (a free app!) and now, there's sweet, sweet, Palm Pre-esque app switching and it works even better than 'Cards' natively, in the WebOS! Let's keep in mind that you can't do voice and data with the Palm Pre on Sprint's network, lol.
The iPhone 3G is a very capable device-- too bad Apple locks it up they way they do. The multitasking probably won't work so smooth on older iPhones but on my iPhone 3G[S] I ran 8 apps at once, and they worked great-- Safari, Pandora, Facebook, Twitterific Premium, Skype (using VOIP pauses the music in Pandora Radio, sound priority of course), Mail, BeejiveIM and Gowalla. No noticeable slowdown, switching was smooth when flicking apps across the screen, and I still had about 32MB of RAM (out of 256MB total) left over. During this time, I was also opening settings and fiddling with the ProSwitcher settings panel and testing interface option which take affect in realtime. All this had a surprisingly low impact on battery life, a lot less than I imagined. I attribute that to the iPhone OS' excellent resource management. The other thing about ProSwitcher, is that it seems to be a lot more stable than Multifl0w.
With the exception of a couple of hardware bonuses, the higher res camera and screens of the droid phones, they don't have nuthin' on an iPhone properly jailbroken and configured.
Another thing that's pretty sweet, is there's a jailbroken app called "My3G" that tricks apps into thinking they're on wifi-- so apps like Skype that are designed to be restricted and only use VOIP on wifi, can be used on the 3G Network (or even Edge) and it works great. There is no other way to use VOIP apps on any mobile phone over 3G :p
Yeah! :D
Here's a video of the early beta of ProSwitcher for iPhone (It's currently released, ver. 1.0):
Eat that you Droid bastards! - C