I usually close most windows when I'm not using them

I find the n900 is quick enough to start apps on an as-needed basis, but it's not got enough RAM to keep many open without pushing it into swap and slowing down the whole system.

As such I've probably only ever had a maximum of 4 windows on my dashboard. A conversations window, witter (twitter client), barriosquare (foursquare.com client) and web-browser.

While I love Maemo's approach to multitasking, the hardware just can't keep up. If the n900 had 1GB of real RAM it would be a completely different story - I'd be multitasking far more. With the hardware limitations though I find it's mostly quicker to just start apps as needed.

Cheers!

That's not quite right, look for "VmLck:" in /proc/[1-9]*/status.

This is pretty much how it's supposed to work There's also a daemon (ohmd) that's supposed to freeze non-whitelisted processes when critical stuff is happening, bug 6203 and the followup maemo-developers thread have some interesting info.

My thoughts exactly. The N900 really should've shipped with at least 512MB of RAM - mine gets horribly slow if I have media player (music), Mappero, Witter and a web browser open at the same time. FSM help if you if you've got a few apps open and then someone sends you an SMS. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable load to me, but maybe Mappero and/or Witter are bloated.

Mission completed!

The poll on multitasking is now closed. The results are impressive:more than 600 votes and more than 200 detailed comments.

In summary,
- over 80% keep typically 1 to 6 applications open on the multitasking view of the Nokia N900
- over 97% of all respondents pro-actively manage the amount of open apps
- only less than 1.5% of all respondents do not close apps actively and leave them all open
- at least 35% of all people detailing their open apps keep various third-party apps open

The final report has been uploaded now on slideshare under http://www.slideshare.net/peterschne...asking-in-n900

So, what happens with the results? You might be surprised.
As indicated at the invitation to this poll, the results such as "Close to 50% of technology enthusiasts using Nokia N900 keep typically 4 to 6 apps open." have become part of the product marketing material for Nokia's MeeGo 1.1 solution.

But, beyond this, the interim results have been made available to the Director Product Management, Director Product Development Program, VP MeeGo Computers R&D (Ari Jaaksi), Harmattan Chief UI designer, and many more. Actions have been initiated already from product management side.

The high amount of pro-active open apps management (over 97%) has led to an additional consideration on how the new Nokia MeeGo UI can maintain an easy way to open and close apps. The fair share of open third-party apps also should have an impact on the system architecture studies currently supporting the UI optimization.

Your contribution as a community and as individual in this poll is very much appreciated. This poll is naturally only one out of many insights in creating an iconic UI design, yet an important one. I'd like to thank also the Community Council to rally the troops to bring in more feedback to this poll.

As this was very useful, at least for me, I will try to do it again, probably on usage of Flash in the browser and plug-ins into the contacts/IM applications. Until then, thanks!

Well, bad timing on my part: I posted a blog article directed to this just before it closed. That sure doesn't look good...

http://tabulacrypticum.wordpress.com...ts-your-input/

For whats its worth..
Together with Modified Hildon Desktop where I can easily switch windows with just keyboard I *always* open up a lot of different web pages. This is of course several instances of the same application.

(I read a lot of news from the Internet all day long)
I start MicroB, open up first news link, switch back to MicroB link page, open second news link and so on.
I use Firefox and I always open my news tab in one go(~15 news sites). Although I haven't found how to do it on the N900 the method I described is ok for me, or rather it is very good(considering it is a phone).

I love being able to switch between the windows like that. One thing which would be nice is if it was possible to open web links in background just as in Firefox because that means I can sift through the webpage from top to bottom, open the links I know I want to read and then after have gone through the main page start reading the various articles that were of interest (open already in background windows).

Dear Peter,

I hope now you and the Director Product Management, Director Product Development Program, VP MeeGo Computers R&D (Ari Jaaksi), Harmattan Chief UI designer, and many more will realize how much potential help this community can offer to Nokia. I think you know that you have the most talented and loyal community members out here and we are willing to help. However in order to maintain good relationship with this community please provide support to N900 and kindly notify persons mentioned above about issues that bother most users.

Thank you

Oops! I guess I haven't been too clear on that this runs only for 2 days. Speedy feedback was needed.

i don't believe there's a word for 'options' in finnish.

Understood. I have just been under the gun at work and just now got a breather to put something decent together. It just never entered my mind the poll would run as short as two days... I was thinking maybe a week or so to get good numbers. Oh well.