Well the iPhone is pretty much screwed in the near future if they stick to their current methods. Think of multitasking. They're already implementing something new that people wouldn't expect as far as usability is concerned. How is someone supposed to know they have to HOLD the home button to get the multitasking? And then also hold an icon to kill it?

(BTW, remember how Steve Jobs said if you had to have a task manager on a smartphone, you were doing it wrong? Seems they did a heel-face-turn on that one. That's exactly what the "kill" function does; task manager functionality)

AFAIK it's double tap to access the multi-task bar thing, but I may be wrong. Either way, it's not intuitive at all. I've told you a few times before that personally I'm still ok without multitasking so I doubt I'll use it all outside of enjoying the faster task switching. I'm not a power user on my phone at all.

In fairness to Steve, his U-turn is exactly the same as all the politicians forced into our new coalition government. When you're campaigning you've got to argue your side, but when you're forced by circumstance to backtrack you've got to keep up appearances.

He still made himself look like a douche nozzle though.

I've been waiting for ages to use that phrase

Well, assuming you have a 3GS, you're getting multitasking whether you want it or not, and thus have to deal with all the issues it has

I don't, I've only got a 3G, but my contract conveniently runs out at the end of June. Even if I did have a 3GS the update isn't mandatory (unless I'm really missing something).

But obviously, the fact that I'm getting a 4G/HD/whatever when it drops in June/July means I'm destined for the new OS, and all the poop that comes with it. Like I said, the multitasking I'll do will only involve fast switching, so I likely won't be killing frozen apps, even if that's what my OCD really wants.

Didn't he make that "no task manager" comment after he announced multitasking (and the kill task function)

Yes, but it's totally not a task manager. It's an innovative, revolutionary, magical application controller.

The whole idea was that you wouldn't have to kill those apps. But they put the kill function in not for OCDers, but because the apps may go haywire and need to be killed.

Also, no, the task killer function was not announced at the same time as the multitasking. It didn't pop up until one of the iPhone OS4 SDK betas. Originally Steve Jobs even said there wasn't a way to kill apps because you "wouldn't need to". Guess someone in the programming department had a talk with Steve and brought him back to the world of reality.

I'm sure I saw the task killer in the first announcement, it was just that it got better in the SDK betas in that you didn't have to re-hold the button down every time you killed an app - once you invoked the kill icons they stayed so you could quickly zap a load of apps in one go.

Either way, it's clunky and poop.

That said, it's something I won't be using very often