Well, on Android, applications are suspended when they are no longer visible to the user. They are still in the memory, but that's it, no event handling, no calculations, nothing (and don't confuse this with stuff like "your music still running in the background", it doesn't actually come from the "real" app, but from a service running - its like a micro app without UI running without you knowing). And if the system needs additional memory, the app you use the least has its state saved and then shut down to free up memory. To the user though, those apps still appear to be in the background, while, in fact, they are not. When they are brought to the foreground, they are actually restarted and their saved state is restored.

On N900 - apps run in the background fully. No suspended or saved states, they run like on your desktop. And you decide when to shut them down. Great and multitasking optimized Maemo, swap file and the power of N900 hardware make this possible without loosing performance greatly.

So, basically, you have an illusion of multitasking on Android vs the real multitasking on N900.


True, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't expect it. Let's just say that, while you can say I just made an educated guess, I'm pretty sure we'll have MeeGo on the N900 (reference platform for MeeGo, Nokia employees giving strong hints, and - lastly - no real reason not to have it, but many reasons not to announce it officially yet)

But, even without MeeGo, I still stand behind what I said