Nokia E71 or iphone 3G

[qandaseeker]

hi, i have a quick question on the iphone 3g and the nokia e71.

the only thing thats tops me from buying the iphone 3g is the lack of multi tasking which is really important for me.

do you think i should buy and nokia e71 (voted the best smart phone of 2008) and aan ipod nao for music or should i just go for the iphone 3g?

NB. the battery life on the e71 compared to the iphone is awesome.

please help me with this situation

thank you

[fo3nix]

By lack of multitasking on the iPhone, what do you mean?

Can you explain something you'd want to do which you can't do on the iPhone? (I have one, so can hopefully tell you if your thoughts are correct or not.)

Also, note that new hardware and software for the iPhone is due July time. If you can wait (and it's easy for you to do so), then I would do.

[qandaseeker]

to fo3nix:

hi, thank s for helping me here. on the e71 you can read an email, download a file listen to music, look at google maps simutanously. is this possible with the iphone 3g? im mean when i use a program, eg. google maps, i can do somrthing else and return to Gmaps without reebooting the program.

cheers

[fo3nix]

The central idea is that you can't see several apps at once (it's a small screen, what's the point?).

However, most apps remember where you were when you exited it. So for example, I can read an email, and see a link to a website. If I touch that link, I'll get taken to the Safari browser, and have that link load. Once I'm done with that, I can press the home button, then touch the Mail icon again, and I'm immediately shown the email that I was just checking. I can now delete or move that email or whatever, and move onto the next email.

The 4 apps that are by default at the bottom of the screen (that is, Phone, Mail, Safari, iPod) are all background-capable apps, meaning that when you close them, they can continue to run in the background. Mail can be set to check for new email every 30mins, for example. iPod can keep playing your music through headphones or the internal speaker while you check your email or browse the web in Safari.

All the other apps don't actually run in the background. When you exit them by pressing the home button (to go back to the home screen), they close. But they do usually save their state, as I said above. This is simply to save battery life --- you don't want people accidentally leaving all kinds of apps open (especially non-Apple ones that may not have been as well programmed), because they'll eat into your battery life.

[fo3nix]

In a few months (same time as new hardware is out), iPhone 3.0 software is due. This is a free update for iPhone 3G owners, and will be the standard software on a new iPhone model due out. Of the many new features, one is background push notifications, for apps like IM chat clients. Apple has disabled this so far because it's hard to get a solution that works well, that doesn't mean letting different apps run in the background to check for new MSN messages (for example) whenever they want. So currently, those apps that let you chat on MSN etc. will stop connecting to the server for new messages when you close them.

I really don't find it a problem. Google Maps is another app that remembers where you were when you last accessed it, so you can easily go from there to Safari to check a link, then back to Google Maps, all while listening to music in the iPod app.

The only issue currently is with the IM apps, as I say above. But this is something that will change in the near future, and even right now I don't find it a problem (though don't use those apps all that much).