Through the years, when Apple released a new version their iPhone, there would always be certain complaints about it. No matter how much people liked the phone, they would complain about one feature that they would consider crucial. For a long time the feature that everybody wanted but was missing from the phone was a copy and paste button. People were upset about this and they constantly complained about it, until finally Apple caved in and gave their customers what they wanted. Now the same thing has happened once again, this time with a feature that most of the other smart phones provide. This is the ability to multi-task their applications while they use the phone.
It occurs to me that some people may not know what that term multitasking means. It is simply the act of being able to use more than one application at a time while on the phone. On earlier versions of the phone, the only time you could multi-task an application was if one of them was an Apple application. Apple let their applications have multi-tasking capabilities while third party software on the phone did not. Now with the iPhone 4.0, this is no longer the case. Now up to seven applications can be used on the phone at one time. This is still less than the other phones on the market but Apple were worried about the efficiency of the applications as well.
The reason why Apple held back so long in allowing third party applications to have the ability to multi-task was because they were worried about the phone crashing all of the time. If you have ever seen a jail broken iPhone then you know that the phone already had the ability to multi-task, Apple just disabled it. Some people may wonder why that is. It is because in the phone, there is a limited amount of space in the memory so too many applications may cause the phone’s operating system to crash. Apple finally decided that they could work out a way where they could keep the phone from crashing all of the time. The solution was the one we talked about earlier, and that was letting seven applications run at once. Seven is mostly likely the most applications that any user would use at once anyway. Sure there are some power users that would probably use more at one time but for most people who use the phone, seven would be more than enough.
Sometimes it does not seem as if Apple is listening to their customer base when they really are. They knew that people wanted the multitasking features that they saw on other phones to be on the iPhone. But they knew that they had to get it right. It seems like the way that they implemented it will more than likely be the right way.