3G would be nice, but what no multi-tasking?

I think I jumped the gun somewhat on my post about the iPhone SDK. I made the assumption that as the iPhone was based on the OSX kernal that it’d be multitasking capable. Having now read this techcrunch post, I’m not so sure the iPhone is capable of multitasking which is a show stopper.

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. (p. 16)

So that means you can set different apps running and flip between them like you can on Nokia S60 devices. This is  as my daughter would say, truly rubbish.

The second wave of stories that has followed the news of the SDK have wound me up slightly, such as this story, it’s all over bar the crying. What doesn’t get mentioned when Steve put’s up his pie chart showing Apple with a huge percentage of the smartphone market is how small that markter is. Up until recently the US smartphone market has been pretty poor, Treo and MS Mobile devices ahve dominated as Nokia hasn’t got a great deal of traction in the US. The second aspect here is as I mentioned above this is a percentage of the North American Smartphone market. 

To put things in persecptive; Compared to Apple’s 190,000 iPhones the Finnish company sold 133 million mobile phones during the quarter (qtr 4, 2008), more than its three closest rivals put together and has 40% of the global market, not just North America. [via]. Even if Apply get’s to it’s goal of selling 10 million in a year, Nokia will have sold 400 Million or more handsets. 

Yes, Apple have once again done a great peice of marketing and have a desirable product, but it’s currently got huge flaws, namely no 3G and no mulitasking and for me they are real show stoppers.