Day two of twenty five, Steve comes out.

Looks like I have three things to talk about today, why I went with iPhone 4 over a iPad, multitasking, and Steve's press con today.

On the subject of Steve's announcement, in general I like what he has offered as a solution. It is not the most amazing solution and it was expected but it is a good gesture. I think he made a bit of a mistake when he tried to point out that many phones when cupped will have some drop in reception. It is going to be easy for people to knock a lot of holes in that. For one, to make the bars drop on many smart phones you have to practically shove the phone into your body covering the whole thing. Also there are smart phones that have extremely good antenna solutions that take into account the human body as a signal absorber. Nokia phones have some of the best antenna of all phones, no surprise they have been making phones forever and have some of the best radio people in the world. Steve talked about all the PHD scientists he has working for him on the iPhone. Well instead of hiring green boys right out of school maybe he should go get some grizzled veterans of the mobile industry. Come to think of it he should be doing that across the board when it comes to iPhone staff. Next he really should listen to his tech staff over his design staff. These two things will save him from any more press conferences where he has to apologize to his loyal customers.

Ok now on to why iPhone over iPad. First I had to make the choice because I can only get so many new toys a quarter. I decided to wait on the iPad to see if it gets the same increased

pixel density that the iPhone got. Next it was simply looking at which one I would use more at this time. Of course the device I have with me all the time will win that. Anyone that knows me knows I spend a huge amount of time on the phone, so that is my key point of contact.

Onto multitasking. First I would like to go through my understanding of the ways multitasking can be delivered.

1. True concurrency is where you can have two or more applications running at the same time all doing some tasks. I wont go into the time slicing and threading that makes this work but that is the gist.

2. Pause and resume is where you can have multiple applications that are open but only the application you are looking at is running and the others are all "saved" at where you left them so that when you switch back to them you pick up where you left off. This is a good model for fast application switching.

3. A mix of both. In this model some features (APIs) can run in true concurrency but most are pause and resume. This works well to support good battery life and lets face it not all features need to be running all the time. This is what I think the iPhone 4 model is.

What does multitasking bring to end users? Well a lot of great things like listening to music while reading email or having a IM client active while doing other tasks and many more. It will be a bit before we see a good number of apps taking advantage of this but I am sure great things will come of it. But that leads me to the majority of current iPhone apps that were not written for a multitasking environment. This causes a big issue since none of those applications have a End or Shutdown button. Here is why this is an issue. The iPhone 4 handles all applications the same regardless if they were built for multitasking or not. When you are in an app and you press the Home button the application does not shut down but it get suspended and put on the multitasking list. If you want to shut it down you have to go to the multitasking list (by double tapping the Home button) and then you have to put that list into a mode that will allow you to shut the apps down by pressing one of the apps in the list and holding for 4 or 5 secs. Then they all start to wiggle and you will see a red minus sign. Press the red minus sign and you shut the app down, do that for all of them and you will clear your multitasking list. Very clunky.

Tomorrow I will be taking about the camera, face time, and video.

Closing note, I sat down last night to just play with the phone and found that besides the screen looking really great and the device running very fast there was nothing much more then my old phone. Not sure if that is good or bad but it was comforting. Oh yes one more thing, reading books on it was much nicer. And as a shout out to my buddy Jon B. I have iBooks, Kindle, and Barnes & Noble readers all running on it ;-). But to your point Jon, I am sure I would like it better if I could run Java on it :p