Palm has some really smart developers on their hands. They managed to do something that no one else has, make task management a legitimate feature.
That’s right, you don’t get a list of apps with each of their CPU usage, instead you get cards that you can flip through and toss away when they are using too much resources. Windows Mobile is a perfect example of how not to do task management. In Windows Mobile you literally have a task manager that lists all of the apps you have open and tells you the CPU usage of each one. This will let you make an intelligent decision about what application you should close but isn’t very user friendly. Apple has also done it all wrong, users want to be able to multitask on their phones and Apple is making that impossible. They at least have a good reason for it though, it keeps battery life high and doesn’t burden users with the task of choosing to close certain applications to maintain performance. But, that doesn’t make up for the inability to load a web page over EDGE while typing out a text message.
Palm on the other hand has done it perfectly, how simple is it to tell users that if they are experiencing poor battery life or performance issues just toss some of your cards? Really simple, arguably a better solution than Apple’s.
Apple is trying to fix some of these problems with push notifications but honestly this will probably only confuse users who may be tricked into thinking their apps are actually running in the background. This false impression won’t last very long though, when they do figure out that AIM isn’t actually running in the background they will either be impressed by how cool that is or be distracted by the fact that they can’t listen to Pandora while surfing the web. Either way it isn’t necessarily the best option for tech-savvy consumers.
For the geeky smartphone user the Pre is looking more and more attractive. If they could just get some more apps for their platform.
