Samsung i8910 HD runs 62 apps at once, multitaskers bow their heads
While iPhone 3G owners and would-be Windows Phone 7 buyers sit in the corner, quietly weeping over their lack of true multitasking, webOS and Symbian continue to point and laugh. In mid-January, a Palm Pre Plus was seen cackling with joy over its rivals' misfortune even as the device staggered under the weight of 50 simultaneous applications, and less than a week later, a Samsung Omnia HD performed the very same feat, despite having only half the Pre Plus' RAM (i.e. 256MB) to work with. Now, in what we can only interpret as a large middle finger and "come here" gesture to all who aspire to the cell phone multitasking heavyweight title, we have a video of the i8910 running no less than sixty-two applications thanks to a custom ROM by HyperX. Watch in stunned silence as a finger scrolls through them, right after the break.


























GG
@n0ne
"They blew it" ;)
@n0ne
BEAST!
@TheSeventhSon
how easy is it closing all of the applications
@n0ne Well said Karl, well said.
FTW
@OCEAN CLAK it's a 62 step process.
1. open task manager
2. select kill all from options menu
3-62. try to get a working starcraft 2 beta.
@n0ne i like your minimalistic efforts
That is such overkill granted i cant run 63 apps on my comp at once but still.
@n0ne Im interested to see how iPhone multitasking pans out when apps are written to take advantage of it. I can open every app in OS 4.0 I have 137 although they aren't doing anything accept moving to the multi tasking tray, then again the guy in this video did nothing but show the apps as 'running'. I don't understand all the hate with using push for IMs in iPhone os In my experience pushing works extremely well with instant messaging apps. Did anyone else notice how painful that one screen change was, then again I think my computer would suffer running 62 apps so impressive none the less.
@RLBurkes yes, but on symbian, these apps are actually still fully RUNNING. iphone handles multitasking differently. symbian basically gives you an alt-tab feature.
@RLBurkes Btw it was a pain in the ass to kill all the apps. One by one, even rebooting doesn't clear them I'm not sure if that is by design though os 4.0 is defo buggy.
@brrip I know dude but he didn't show anything that showed how well, I'm not arguing that it was impressive but I would of enjoyed it more if he actually launched some of the apps to give an idea of the responsiveness. The webos multi tasking was sweet because the cards are pretty much always loaded not hiding behind an icon like all the other mobile os'es. iPhone os multi tasking doesn't do anything at all right now, so it's hard to tell how nice it may or may not be.
@RLBurkes yeah admittedly i was expecting to see the apps and their smoothness as well, but i can imagine it would be stuttery at best. lucky/unlucky for me, i'm an i8910 user so i'll check out this delicious rom when it's out.
@RLBurkes Push notifications are insecure for one. Jail breakers have had issues where by faking a device ID to Apple's servers (in order to enable push notifications) they end up getting the notifications of the real owner of that device.
But a bigger issue to me is that if someone sends me a instant message and I wish to respond by my phone, it takes nearly a full minute for the app to launch, connect to the servers, and be ready to type out my response. Why? Becuase my client isn't connected, a remote client running on someone else's sever is connected. With true multitasking, it would take only 1 second to swap back into the already running App.
And what if I wanted ot multi-task with IRC instead of an IM client? There's no way push works for that.
I don't know. I feel like I'm an adult and I want my operating system to acknowledge that fact and let *me* decide how to spend my allotted battery life.
@n0ne Samsung seems to be giving a greater attention to the i8910 (omnia HD) now. Anyway, those procs are pretty darn-fast! Not a show-off but rather, to give emphasis on the threshold of the running capability of i8910. first view. http://bit.ly/samsung-omnia-hd-reactions
@n0ne Are people really this dense? Most of these 'apps' are preference apps that basically do nothing in the background. You've got a calculator app, notes, sync apps, profile app, bluetooth prefs. All 62 apps are using under 90MB of RAM.
Let's focus on that one point, these are apps using on average under 2MB RAM each.
In other words this device is basically running 4 real apps: QuickOffice, PowerMP3, RealPlayer and Opera and even they aren't going to be doing any processing.
Just to clarify things on the iPhone front, it concurrently runs:
1) MobileSafari
2) SpringBoard
3) MobileMail
4) DTMobileIS
5) MobileMusicPlayer
6) MobilePhone
7) mediaserverd
8) configd
9) CommCenter
10) lockdownd
11) fairplayd
12) ptpd
13) BTServer
14) mDNSResponder
15) accessoryd
16) configd
17) amfid
18) notification_pro
19) syslogd
20) notifyd
21) launchd
22) Whatever 3rd party app you are running
OOOOOOOOHHHH N3RDG4SM!1!!1!1!!1111
22 apps at once and that's before iPhone OS 4.0. Get a clue guys.
@OCEAN CLAK The only way to close the applications is for it to crash. ;)
@TinWard
No, the ones ending in d are daemons, eg, services running in the background that act as liaisons between apps and the world. The rest are operating system tasks (much as you'd see in a clean install of windows or macos). They're not "apps". They don't, in and of themselves, really do anything except to provide other apps with functionality. The hardware and OS on the iPhone is perfectly capable of doing multitasking, it's just at the whim of The Jobs that the user is prevented from taking advantage of this faculty. The OS does it for itself all the time.
@n0ne
I just got twenty one on my iPhone 3gs before it almost crashed on me.
@TinWard He didn't include core apps that you are including
@TinWard Right now my Symbian device is running 132 processes, system applications and services is included just like you included. Should I post the full list as you did if it'd prove any point?
@GeceBekcisi That's exactly it, there is no point to prove here. Just because someone decided to leave apps open proves nothing about endurance whatsoever when the apps use less than 2MB of RAM each and don't do any processing.
On the desktop, you can do the same thing, open Minesweeper, Wordpad, as many widgets as you want. You'd probably be able to launch 100 apps of that size in a matter of seconds. Does that mean your machine is uber-fast? No, it means you're running very basic apps that don't need a lot of resources to run.
@n0ne
Awesome :D
i tried this on my i8910, i just opened everything i could find. i got to around 30 apps when the phone became VERY laggy and complained baout not having enough RAM
But that's more apps than anybody needs at the same time anyway
@n0ne
Pwnage!
@lesliekronx Nope! Samsung is not giving the attention at all. They don't give it a damn. Most of the features that sammy promised in this device for instance 24fps or pre-focus in the video recording are actually delivered by custom ROM cookers like hyper-x, wireless and others. If it was not for these guys i8910 would have died in 2009.
Overkill.
@LiQuiDFuSioN
apple fail
@mascarpone
Indeed, fine sir. who blew it now, Jobs?
@LiQuiDFuSioN
Yeah I'm sure teh 10 people that bought this phone are pretty smug. Are those 62 applications the only 62 available for those two platforms combined?
I don't get the hard on for multitasking to this extent from people. Yes, I know several instances where it'd been nice had it done it, however they've got a solution coming and it'll more than address my needs.
I'm not about to run out and buy a symbian or god forbid a failing palm web os based phone just because I can load 62 apps and have them all running at one time.
I've learned to live without multitasking, and sometimes my ADD is better for it. When the state saving multitasking capability of the iPhone OS hits it'll be a nice change. However just because some phone can do 'more' doesn't mean it's 'better' somehow.
@Trekkie
Just like more apps in an app store doesn't make it better...
@mascarpone
How is this Apple failing at anything? With how iPhone OS works, you could open 300 apps, keep all the background processes running that you actually need, and still have usable battery life specifically because it doesn't leave all those apps running.
That's far smarter than just being able to open a bunch of apps and leave them all running at the same time, because you know, enjoy that 10 minutes of battery life and zero usability.
Damn.
Symbian post on Engadget!!!! Am I dreaming or its the End of the world.
@rehan716
Not just a Symbian post on Engadget but also a positive one. My mind is blown!
@rehan716
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
@Indyaner
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality
@rehan716 next up, engadget app for symbian!
... yeah right.
@williamtsims
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and seeee
@rehan716
HEAR THAT, ENGADGET?! Less Apple-hugging, more news on other platforms.
@Indyaner
Easy come, easy go.
Palm is the new fandango!!
@darkmax
Less bitching about Apple products and more using this URL:
http://www.engadget.com/exclude/apple
Holy crap!!
@creepytech Well... I can do launch 20 apps on my Nokia N80 which has 64 MB ram and those do not slow down the phone (AFAIK it has OMAP1 inside). OS will start to close apps pretty quickly if I open many ram heavy apps, though.
Steve Jobs response, "been there done that"
@iPaul
oh?
@iPaul
Really? How?
I wouldn't call iPhone's multitasking not "true" multitasking. It has "intelligent multitasking". Even though I prefer the freedom of Android's (also kinda intelligent) multitasking (which is needed because of all the widgets), with iPhone, you I wouldn't want to have it any more different.
When I'm playing a game, I want my game to pause when I'm on a different app. When I'm streaming Pandora, I want the audio to keep streaming when I'm on another app. When I'm on a VOIP call, same thing. I wouldn't imagine any limitation with iPhone's multitasking. I don't want all my apps running 100% in the background. By that multitasking on my S60 phone, turns out it's exactly like the iPhone's. The game's pause, and the audio and VOIP keep on going.
WP7's multitasking as we know it now, on the other hand, is truly crippled, since they don't have intelligent APIs for specific scenarios like iPhone. Sure they "may" announce it before launch, but it will make them look like copycats, TBH.
So yeah I wouldn't put WP7 and iPhone in the same category of multitasking. If Android didn't have homescreen widgets, like iPhone, I would have wanted it to have the same intelligent multitaskin of iPhone to avoid any sluggishness and depleted battery life.
@TareG well there's other tasks... like IM, for example, which don't fall under any of the "multitasking" areas except for push... which isn't multitasking at all. (as the persistent connection is done on a 3rd party server, instead of the phone) some things can fall under task completion but there's just a select few things that just don't fit any criteria under apples system
@DopeyFish
That's true. As I said, Android's multitasking is "complete" without the need for specific APIs, then again, iPhone already has push IM notifications to handle that, and I guess we can both agree that the iPhone UI is noticeably smoother than Android's, even though the Nexus One is boasting a new generation of specs compared to the iPhone's.
I'm saying that the form of multitasking on the iPhone is perfect for the iPhone, unlike WP7's.
@TareG
It's not that. It's just that the iPhone/3G won't be getting multi-tasking AT ALL. That isn't true multi-tasking,is it?