Monday 27 September 2010

Why Windows Phone 7 Doesn’t Multitask

When I heard that Windows Phone 7 did not support multitasking I thought the same as most people, “here we go, Microsoft spent all this money on getting a new phone OS to market and they are already making the same mistakes as Apple”.  This view point was shared my many people however today I stared watching the Windows Phone 7 Jump Start and they also mentioned the lack of multitask support for non Windows Phone apps and this this why………

Put yourself in Microsoft's shoes, think of the money the fame and fortune…are you there?  Good.  Now think about spending millions of dollars on a crating a new OS for mobile devices then you force all phone manufactures to provide good hardware or go home, then you look at the competition who seem to be beating you hands down, but you see a strategy to beat them.  You also look at the people who hate you and are waiting to pull your OS and any device apart and expose you for the fraud they think you are.

When you take all that in you suddenly realise that making your phone succeed is going to be hard and you will do everything you can to stop it falling at the first hurdle, and in this case battery power is our hurdle.  If you let any old app on your device continue to run in the background, what is stopping it from buzzing away making network calls or just continually talking to the OS and every one of these calls requires a little bit of battery power.  The issue is, how do you protect the image of your new phone for crappy developers?

In the mobile world not only do we all want an amazing experience with everything popping out of the screen we also want to keep using our phone for longer than a day, and cutting multitasking for non-MS apps is Microsoft’s answer.  As we all know your average user won’t think “oh I had all these apps running that's why my phone only lasted an hour” they will just slate the phone and bang Windows Phone 7 dies.

IMHO I am sure like Apple multitasking apps will come in the future.

If you want to learn more about Windows Phone 7 check out these 12, 1 hour long presentations @ here

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