Because they arent minimized - this isnt windows. They are simply put into the background. Hence the term multi-task. My advice to you if you don't want the flash chewing up your battery is

a) Download the flash blocked greasedmonkey script.
b) Close the browser window when done with it instead of putting it into the background

You can't have both man. You want a true multi-tasking OS then you gotta take the good with the bad.

I mean you mention the ihpone, but up until recently without a jailbreak hack you couldnt even play music with pandora and browse at the same time. Do you really want to go to something like that?

Saying goes: go its own way, whatever others may say. I think you should be happy for N900 instead of throwing it into the river.

Running 20+ apps in the background simultaneously is just showing what it can do, you don't really running that many apps all the time.

My aunt uses computer everyday, but she'd never switch task. I.e. She'd close the facebook first when she needs to check the webmail, and close the browser altogether when she needs to work on word document.

Being a lawyer, supposedly she's a very smart person, but multitasking in PC is just totally useless to her.

Having a true multitasking is important only when you need it.

I'll raise you a concise question: So?

Assuming by "2 month old phone" you mean anything other than the N900, that proves nothing, and if you do mean the N900, I still return to the "so" bit, because even if my better performance has something to do with kernel vm tweaks and the like, at the end of the day it's still the same argument - someone said "The N900 can run 30 apps" (implicitly - can run them well) - you said "go run 30 browser pages" - the two points - A, without background crap clogging your system, it runs far more webpages without lag/slowness than other current phones do, and B, 30 apps doesn't equal 30 browser windows, as those can often be flash add, javascript, and the like, bloated, as well as being optimized for desktop viewing on desktop hardware (I.E., not optimized at all, more or less).

Point is, 30 webpages being slow and laggy doesn't mean there aren't perfectly practical situations when the N900 will run 30 programs that you're actually using (and not just running for the lol-look-at-how-much-I'm-running-on-my-phone factor), with decent performance. Is there slowness? Yes, if you push it. But if you want it to be pretty and shiny and responsive like an iPhone, just run it like an iPhone with one app at a time, and the result will be similar.

Ummm... I've drained iPhones in 2 hours with non-stop CPU-heavy usage too. Doesn't really mean anything. I've also drained my laptop in 2 hours with heavy CPU-usage. (Not that my laptop is "high-end" enough to expect hours upon hours of high-performance uptime, but whatever.)

Seriously, if you take an N900 that's relatively "clean" of background tasks/daemons/programs, and I suspect you'd see similar if not better uptime in CPU-heavy use-cases to iPhones/etc. Especially if you only run one task at once ever. Though I'd love to hear comparisons of multitasking jailbroken iPhones vs. an N900 running the same/similar stuff at once.

Actually, that is minimizing - putting something in the background. "State-saving" is the most common term I know for freezing all the background stuff.

That said, there's plenty of uses for having crap run in the background. Maybe I have a flash game that's loading and I want to go type up something on an essay I'm working on in FreOffice or whatever while it loads (given that I'm probably the only one writing essays in FreOffice on the N900 regularly, replace that with typing a text message or something). Maybe I don't have a song/podcast/whatever on my device, but want to listen to a youtube video of it - I sure as hell don't want to sit there and stare at the webpage, effectively paralyzing my device from doing anything else useful.

Wait. That's kinda genius. Yes you can have both (not can in the practical sense of it being available on some device already, but can as in, when you think about it, there's no reason for it not to be an option). Just give users one more button in the UI next to close/minimize/maximize/whatever that state-saves the program instead. This would do wonderfully on mobile/embedded devices... Might be a nice feature to have on desktops too... Nice enough that I feel that it should be implemented into the Linux ecosystem as soon as possible and people who don't want to use it can continue not to use it. If only I had the expertise I'd actually be very motivated to try to implement this in Maemo right now.

multitasking is good thin tht iphone doesnt ve...its always useful

To be honest the multitasking on the IPhone works fine, its a lot like symbian, but apart from the fact that it doesn't give a small active screenshot of the application, it works very very fast, so I can't see peoples arguement that the IPhone doesn't multitask well because it does.

stopped reading, total noob.

The most of the apps simply freezes. So this has nothing to do with multitask.
I'm able to check my eMails while I'm uploading images to my blog and a youtube video is playing in the background.

Your face is slow and laggy,

Now move along troll ....

PFFFT.

I stuff doesnt multitask and when it does its rare, it just reboots the app, on the ipod touch (Latest gen) and ipad, it quite frankly sucks.

@ Mentalist Traceur

Sorry. I can't read all that. I really do find my eyes getting heavy after the first three lines.

But yeah, like I said before. I call BS on running 30 apps at once. Try running 30 open browser windows and see what happens.