“We weren’t the first to this party but we’re gonna be the best.” Says Steve Jobs at Apple’s latest event addressing quite possibly the most desired missing iPhone feature… multitasking.
“It’s really easy to implement multitasking in a way that really drains battery life, and it’s really easy to implement it in a way that reduces the performance of the foreground app. we figured out how to implement this for 3rd party apps and avoid these things.” he continues.
How does it work? Apps will remain hidden until you double click the home button and see a list of your apps, and you can just tap to switch between apps. There are a total of 7 different types of services that will be able to run in the background.
1) Audio, so you’ll be able run audio apps in the background while using any other app.
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2) VOIP which mean you’ll be able to receive calls in the background. Skype call stays open and tappable at the top of the screen. Pretty neat, makes Skype on the iPhone a lot more convenient.
3) Location Now the iPhone can continue to track your location with GPS in the background and it shouldn’t drain your battery because it won’t require GPS to be on all the time, using cell towers to track your location.
4) Updated push notifications
5) Local notifications: No longer need to use Apple’s servers to get push notifications delivered to you.
6) Task completion so you can finish things like uploads in the background.
7) Fast app switching, which lets apps sleep and resume instantly.
The sad news? iPhone 3G, iPod touch 2nd gen WON’T support multitasking. “The hardware isn’t capable.”
The iPad will get the new OS in the Fall.
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