Originally Posted by cohowap
Actually, I think people are getting more bent out on the multi-tasking than they should.
The reality is, you will still be able to do any of the phone native features (zune, web downloads, phone calls, etc...) without being interupted. There is essentially 2 layers of code execution.
Layer 1) System Level - These are apps designed to run in the background, most likely writting with the NDK that MS isn't releasing publically but can be requested by OEMs and larger development companies, such as pandora and other main stream companies.
Layer 2) The everyday Joe. This is code that you and I write. These apps run on the Silverlight or XNA runtime and are essentially ran in "Protected" mode, where the OS will execute them outside the realm of the OS. This will keep resources secured and functionality of the native phone features to a maximum performance level. Moreover, it will allow the third part application your running to get more resources to power it.
Now, while this model doesn't sound ideal, the fact is, to a user you will only have 1 of these apps open at a time anyways. Thus, it doesn't really matter if the OS makes it pause or kills the resource. If the third party app is coded correctly, it will be transparent to the user anyways. You will go back to the application in the same state it was left. The only problem here is if the app was downloading data or set to update some data on a schedule, the app would have to be opened instead of running in the background running essentially as a polling service which would be killing your battery life and slowing the phone down overall.
Moreover, you'll notice in multi-tasking environments that applications take a little bit to launch. While this doesn't really matter much on a laptop, it can mean alot on the phone. Do you want to wait a minute for an app to load? It's not an ideal scenario, but if they can suspend a few processes and make the phone run alot faster, apps load alot quicker, web sites load in half the time, it's probably worth it. You aren't really loosing much if you just step back and look at it.
You WILL be able to listen to music, including a few streaming sites while using the phone. This is the primary concern many have, and in reality it is of zero concern because it will be allowed.
What won't be allowed is for you to run (as an example) MyNiftyFartingApp and MyNiftyBeerDrinkingApp at the same time. But really, who the hell would do that or even care?
I promise in the end, once the platform develops, we'll all be happy. This is a first release of a product that was designed and developed in 18 months. There is already plans to expand the development, and we will be seeing updates quite often. Hopefully Microsoft controls the update and not carriers or OEMS.
There's an arguement for both sides, but sit a WP7 phone and a WM6.5 phone side by side, I promise 9 out of 10 will pickup the WP7 phone. If anything, you guys should be bitching about how the SDK will prevent people from creating apps like WiFi Router, which isn't a limitation of the phone more than it is a limitation of the SDK/SL/XNA.
But like I said, 6 months after release, it will be a totally different story.
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