11 July 2009 11:36p Pacific
by Matt Sherman
Joshua Topolsky offers a very funny and insightful take on the iPhone’s very fundamental flaw: it is designed for doing one thing at a time.
[…] my work requires that I use a bunch of web tools, look at lots of news sites, and have a feed reader open... basically, things that would require some level of multitasking. Imagine the frustration of having to constantly break the connection in chat to go look at a site or work on a post. It's frustrating, let me tell you. The idea of jumping into and out of applications -- of having to actually quit an app to move to another one – is an incredibly outmoded and foreign idea in 2009 […] Funnily, the Safari experience provides better multitasking than the phone itself.
That last point is a good one. Safari itself allows you to keep multiple “apps” open at once. The rest of the phone does not.
The iPhone version of Tweetdeck has an interface that looks an awful lot like the Pre, by the way. Will Apple be forced to adopt such an approach?