Thread: [Council] Influence Nokia by voting in a poll on N900 multitasking
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jnwi is offline jnwi
2010-09-09 , 20:09
Posts: 145 | Thanked: 237 times | Joined on Mar 2010 @ Helsinki
#30
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
I go with the former: focus on geeks. We are more critical, more demanding, and more likely to help a company shake out bugs early. Look at what this community of geeks did (and could have done had Nokia listened better) for Maemo.

Make geeks (prosumers, early adopters, et al) happy, and we/they will be your strongest free sales force. Modern Marketing 101.
I agree with you, but on the other hand I also believe that to make geeks happy you have to make the mass market happy. We're not entirely different, we're a superset. The most frequent complaints on this very site are about stuff that s40 does better. And you could've found out about that exactly by listening to the mass market.

So even if I'm restating what you're saying, I think we need to be more precise and say that a winning product satisfies *all* the needs of the geeks, not just the *geeky* needs of the geeks. When I read about focusing on geeks, I think about things like the terminal application, but that's only half of the picture.


Speaking of marketing, geeks don't live in isolation even if they're 100% happy with the product. I believe there has been a transition to a very strange state of affairs in the current market.

10+ years ago, if you had nerdy electronics, you were ahead of the curve. People may not have understood your devices, and they may have dismissed you as a nerd, but deep down they recognized that your operating system was more advanced. And that gave many people the emotional kick they needed. (Yes, geeks have emotional needs too )

Today, if you choose the geeky alternative, you're using a "worse" product. The question isn't "Why are you bothering with Linux when everyone is standardized on Windows", but rather "Why are you bothering with Maemo when the iPhone is better". That's disheartening. See this thread.

The interaction between the geek market and the mass market goes both ways, not just one. Even geeks need a socially acceptable choice of product, eventually, or they're going to find something else.


Originally Posted by pwm View Post
Better multitasking means more applications being used. But this gives more danger of a wild process quickly eating the remaining battery which may be devastating on a business trip. Not a marketing issue, but a phone that could allow individual quota for each application would really be nice.
Originally Posted by maxximuscool View Post
Music, GPS, Browser can run live even in the back ground, anything else can be Pause for the sake of Saving RAM and Smoothen the camera recording, also increase the productivity of the N900 as well.
The battery reliability issue is huge. My N900 is amazing 99% of the time, but when I'm abroad I'm so scared of that one percent chance something random will drain my battery that I switch to my Symbian phone. I don't agree that the solution is to cripple multitasking, though. There should be an alarm if the CPU is too active for more than 5 minutes with the screen off, imho.

Most applications already "pause" when they're not being used. They just sit there doing nothing while waiting for user input. If they're swapped out of RAM, going back is slower, but the same applies to opening forcefully suspended apps.

Originally Posted by gabby131 View Post
like just one experience of mine having 3 web browser windows open, transition app and bounce, i was to beat my high score then my mom called, i minimized the game and rush to my mom, when i get back on, and restore bounce, it was a game over.
Surely this is a problem with Bounce itself? Even if the scheduler were to allocate zero cycles to it while you talk, the clock would still keep moving and the game would get confused when you return.


Originally Posted by twigleaf1976 View Post
On a poll of multitasking I had to vote that I use quite a few windows. But there wasn't a choice that said I had to because of appalling design in the OS. Maemo makes you open a page for every web page, it opens up a page for each conversation so I have 5 open using 2 apps.

Neither a valid use of multitasking because there is no juice left for me to run other apps, for example if I put music on as well the music skips because it can't hack web browsing, flash and music at the same time. Nor is it a measure of happiness in the N900 or the N900's ability to multitask. I could do more and with better results on my tytn2 under winmo 6.0.

Your problem is probably due to audio itself not being properly hardware accelerated. Pulseaudio is currently taking 20-30% CPU time on my N900. With that kind of usage, it's going to be very sensitive to *anything* else happening.

One app opening multiple windows will not significantly increase RAM usage. By implementing tabs within the apps, you're increasing the complexity of the apps themselves (Both from a UI and resource perspective).

Web browsing and messaging are such a fundamental part of the experience that I enjoy having the separate views directly accessible from the task switcher. If every app did the same, the task switcher would obviously get too cluttered.