Well, it looks like the official excuse is going to be “you shouldn’t be running so many third-party apps.”
At this point, it’s largely a philosophical dispute about whether users should be allowed to drive their car into a ditch or not. Google, being a company run by engineers, sees no problem with this. Apple, being a company run by marketers, insists on protecting you from yourself – even against your will – because people might think the device sucks if the battery comes up short.
You can make an argument either way – I think the iPhone would have been dead on arrival if they had enabled that sort of multitasking, or 3G, or GPS, because terrible battery life would have strangled the baby in the crib – but you can’t really repeal physics. And the fact is, if you put a bigger load on the processor by multi-tasking, it will consume more power, and the battery will not last as long. Period, paragraph. Buy the ticket, take the ride, and no amount of magic pixie-dust will solve that.
ETA: try this link, the first one was gobsmacked.
The official excuse should be “What did you expect? It’s not an iPhone, people.”
I think, too, that when people carp about the iPhone not doing multitasking, they should check with people who jailbreak and see how their battery life goes…
Honestly, I think that at this point, the advances are going to come in the form of some way of automagically powering down this feature or that and eking a few more minutes of battery out that way. Lithium Polymer has gone about as far as I think it can go, and despite a physically larger battery in the notional 4th-gen iPhone, I still fully anticipate needing to charge that sonofabitch every night once I have it.
I’ve only got four pages of apps so maybe I don’t fully understand, but do I really need to multi-task? What is it going to let me do that I can’t already do with my iPhone? So my FB status goes through while I’m checking email? That’s what? Three – four extra seconds of processing? What am I missing?