On my Iphone 3GS whenever I click away from one app to use another and then switch back, the original app has to say reload a page (if it’s a browser) or relog in if it’s a communications app. So really thus isn’t true multitasking. Has true multitasking been implemented in the latest one?
As I understand it the problem you’re describing is caused by a lack of memory, not multitasking.
It’s the same in the current phone; they haven’t changed that since they first introduced the multi-tasking.
As I understand it, it’s a function of how much memory the apps are consuming, as tellyworth said. If you load a webpage, then go do a bunch of stuff, the iPhone has to decide to sacrifice whatever it’s got in memory to accomplish what you’re asking it to do now. Then you go back to the webpage and it needs to reload, since it couldn’t hold everything in memory at once.
I’d guess that newer versions won’t suffer the problem as much as your 3GS, but you can definitely still hit the limit.
As an experimental example, I loaded an SDMB thread in Safari, then double-tapped the home button to switch to Twitter, where I loaded the latest tweets in my timeline and scrolled through them a bit. Then I double-tap-switched back to Safari, and it did NOT reload the page.
Its also possible that any given app may not have been written/updated with multitasking and saved states in mind. Not all of them have.
It had little to do with memory - it’s all about power consumption.
Apple doesn’t allow full multitasking because the battery life would be abysmal, what with all kinds of hidden apps running in the background doing pointless things that the user can’t see.
So, they allow a very specific subset of possible activities to go on in the background - playing audio, checking for emails, push notifications, etc.
Right, but they also allow apps to save their state upon exit, so at next launch, the app looks to be exactly as you left it instead of restarting from scratch, as appears to be happening on the OP’s phone.
The allowance of select actions may be partly due to battery life concerns, but the refreshing of pages in Mobile Safari is definitely because the local copy of those pages are being flushed from RAM. More RAM, fewer flushes.