Skype doesn't work in the background.

Not much seems to work in the background. My understanding is apps must recompile with SDK 4 and they automatically get backgrounding. The old understanding was that all apps would get backgrounding automatically.

What's worse, I believe you must use an unstable beta XCode to compile SDK 4. This is all very lame.

That's how it should be on a small, mobile device that favors standby over true shutdown. But it shouldn't have taken until version 4 of the OS.

Pandora and Dropbox work nicely now, but Skype and TouchTerm don't. And most applications don't support the quick resume. All of this should have been easy to get right on the first release of the OS.

Yet they talk about "getting it done right is worth the wait" as if it takes a genius to figure out the few things that are useful to run in the background on an iPod.

So Apple finally gets around to adding a basic feature years later, and it's brilliant? I've been multitasking on my phones for years... I am always amazed at just how brainwashed Apple fanboys are. They're worse than Sony fanboys.

If anyone else released a phone that couldn't even be held normally without dropping signal, people would tear into them. But because it's Apple, it's only a minor inconvenience.

Except they aren't charging for iOS 4 at all.

Not directly, but if you have old hardware, you need to buy new.

They are artificially feature limited unless you buy new hardware. Sort of like the last round of updates - leaving MMS off of the original iPhone. I'm sure they've pulled other crap like that, I just don't pay attention.

It's also kind of weird considering how compatible Android tries to be.

This discussion about multitasking reminds me of my old Q-Tec PDA with Win Mobile 5 which backgrounds the application upon clicking cross button and you have to end the task from memory manager, because it wears out battery quite sooner.

Also reminds me of my friend who at first nagged about iPad not having multitasking. He suddenly switched sides and proclaims that multitasking is wrong on mobile devices, because it just backgrounds the application, user doesn't know it's still running and soon you have many applications running in background for no reason, when all you needed was to shutdown them when you've closed them. Everytime I ask what about IM or Skype running in background when browsing web...

That works just fine on the iPhone/iPad. Only third party apps are subject to the "no multitasking" rule (and that has changed now with iOS4, in some ways).

What if you want to listen to Pandora or Last.FM while browsing?

Also, I think that iPhone's push notifications are a joke. They seem so outdated - a modal popup, with no way to view the alert later or anything?

The current discussion was related to iPhone OS 3, where there was no multitasking.

I thought you had one of those $5/year phones.