Phone Systems: iPhone Multitasking

The news is likely to come as a massive shock to current and new iPhone customers, who will no doubt expect to be able to multitask any app from day one.

I think Miles is right about customer expectations. Many customers will expect full multitasking of all apps from the moment the iPhone comes out of the box. It's what you get on a Mac or a PC, after all. And those customers will be disappointed.

The tasks that will be allowed to multitask

Among the tasks that will be allowed to multitask, said [Scott Forestall, Apple senior vice president of iPhone software] are audio play, voice over IP (VoIP), location services, task completion and what Apple called fast application switching, which suspends an application, then lets a user resume at the point he or she left off.

But wait! There's more! (Or, rather, there's less). Apple will make iOS 4 available to owners of existing iPhones. But not all existing iPhones will be supported for everything. Owners of the first-generation iPhone won't get iOS 4 at all. And only owners of recent devices will get multitasking support in iOS 4: For example, the iPhone 3GS, and the 32GB and 64GB models of the latest iPod Touch will support multitasking, but the iPhone 3G (that's the model I now have) won't. Apple says the iOS 4 restrictions on older devices are due to hardware limitations.

But I think a lot of people haven't been paying attention to what Apple has been saying. They're going to buy iPhone 4 expecting complete multitasking, and they're going to feel burned.