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by raimue 4804 days ago
Most importantly, Sailfish offers real multi-tasking as we know it from desktop operating systems. While in Android or iOS your application is suspended when you switch to another one, in Sailfish they can run in the background.
2 comments
Zigurd 4804 days ago
"While in Android or iOS your application is suspended when you switch to another one"

That's not correct. Android has multi-processing. The Android runtime enables Service components to run in the background, and has preemptive thread scheduling, and has had these features throughout all publicly released versions of Android.

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nexox 4803 days ago
In my experience, Android multitasking still doesn't work like a desktop (or even my old n900.) Certain applications (those registered as services) can continue to work in the background, but many suspend entirely.

Sometimes I want to do something else while I wait for a large web page to load over my mobile data connection. On my n900 this worked fine, but as soon as I switch to another task, Chrome on Android 4.2.2 quits loading the page.

Plus, task switching is still a heavy operation on Android - swapping back and forth between two applications is a bulky, slow operation compared to the n900, which, itself, was bulky and slow compared to a desktop window manager.

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Zigurd 4803 days ago
You may be executing code on the UI thread. Take a look at Loader for a construct designed to preserve state across component lifecycle events: http://developer.android.com/guide/components/loaders.html
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podperson 4803 days ago
Suspending apps in the background of iOS is a _feature_. It's not like the OS doesn't support "real multi-tasking". Apple could give us "real multi-tasking" at the flick of a software switch -- most of us prefer battery life.
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pessimizer 4803 days ago
This is a piece of common wisdom among the Apple "slavery is freedom" crowd, and is impervious to the fact that N900s and N9s have fine battery lives. I frequently have a couple of browser windows, my media player, bash, and an SMS window open on my N900, and it isn't too tough on my battery.

The problem with battery life and multitasking on N900 is that it has so little RAM that it gets super swappy and starts to thrash esp. under heavy client-side js. I'm dying for an N900 w/2013 specs.

>Apple could give us "real multi-tasking" at the flick of a software switch

This is not true. Task management has to be designed into a multitasking OS. Maemo did a beautiful job.

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raimue 4803 days ago
Have you ever used a N900 or N9? Both of these devices do offer full multi-tasking and base their software stack on the Linux kernel and glibc. The battery life of the devices is actually quite decent.
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