Multitasking on the iPhone

Multitasking, quite possibly the most requested feature on the iPhone, will probably still be limited in some way, even when it is announced. In order to strike a balance between the power of multitasking and the drain on performance and battery life, Apple will probably limit the number of simultaneous apps to 4. However, Apple will only implement task management if it is simple enough for a child to manage. This means there will be no real process manager. Instead, there will need to be an intuitive GUI for users to manage multiple apps.

Luckily, Apple already has an easy-to-use interface for managing multiple simultaneous applications on the Mac. It’s called Spaces. Spaces was designed to make managing multiple applications as intuitive as possible by creating the illusion of having multiple Mac desktops on which these applications are running. A similar paradigm would work excellently on the iPhone, where the user could have four Spaces, or home screens, each running a separate application. It’d be like having 4 iPhones in your pocket.

I have created a quick video to demonstrate how this might work…