[pessimizer]

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.