Thread: I got an iPod Touch (review compared to an N810)
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Benson is offline Benson
2008-03-27 , 16:17
Posts: 4,930 | Thanked: 2,272 times | Joined on Oct 2007
#41
Originally Posted by sondjata View Post
I have to concur here. Yesterday due to work I "had" to use my N800 to play tunes. So I used xmms (which has it's own problems which would require another post altogether) to play some mp3's I have. Every now and then the music would stop. I finally figured out that it was refreshing the RSS feeds. Then I made the mistake of checking my blog stats. Stutter city. I even think the music slowed down. The processor spiked and then the battery was done.
Well, xmms isn't something I'd recommend for multitasking; as you point out, it does have its own problems, including an unquenchable thirst for CPU. I use mpd, and rarely get any glitches. (In OS2007, it would glitch whenever I scanned for networks; fixed in OS2008.) I don't use the RSS reader, but other playback options are much less brittle than xmms.
Originally Posted by Benz145
However, for some of us we would rather run apps one at a time with incredible responsiveness, than multiple low quality apps that don't function well at the same time.
That really hits the nail on the head; multiple low quality apps are trouble. And they stay trouble even when you only have one open. If the apps are good, there should be no trouble from background tasks. (Implementation details, like that the background tasks run at low nice, can always kill you, but there's no inherent problems.)
With good apps, in a good multi-tasking system, more apps just slow the system down without causing serious trouble, and running a single app will always be fine.