Multitasking on Android
Rather than following Apple’s philosophy of only allowing one application to be run on the iPhone at any given time, Google is working to make multi-tasking more reliable on a PDA/phone. As Google’s 11/932,613 discusses, although you can expect a desktop user to close applications, the same cannot be expected of a PDA/phone user. And as applications stay open, memory fills up. Next stop - application crash. Google’s invention aims at solving this problem by automatically terminating applications. Their trick is to save the applications state before terminating, and making it appear to the user that the application is still running. Presumably, it would know if the application is performing something in the background, and avoid its termination.
Anyone know if Android does this today?
I’m typing this reply on my G1 right now, running android, haha.
Yes the G1 does this but it can be somewhat sloppy at times: if it terminates the IM application while you’re in a chat, when it reloads the app it’ll bring the chat back up blank. Dunno if this is fixed in the new update that is supposed to come out.
I think I will try to recommend this post to my friends and family, cuz it’s really helpful.
With the recent Android OS versions, I don’t think task killers are required. On my N1 I note no difference in speed when killing tasks; even so, on my Hero operating 1.5 there was a noted difference after killing some apps (like Google Maps).