Coker: Android Multitasking [LWN.net]

At his blog, Russell Coker examines Android multitasking, particularly as it is revealed in the "Multi Window Mode" supported on some Samsung devices, and is less than overwhelmed. "So while Android being based on Linux does multitask really well in the technical computer-science definition it doesn't do so well in the user-centric definition. In practice Android multitasking is mostly about task switching and doing things like checking email in the background. Having multiple programs running at once is particularly difficult due to the Android model of applications sometimes terminating when they aren't visible."

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Coker: Android Multitasking

Posted Feb 16, 2013 13:01 UTC (Sat) by willp (subscriber, #52971) [Link]

Hmm. On my android tablet (Asus Transformer Prime TF201), with keyboard dock, I can hit alt-Tab and switch between applications. Also, with the USB port on the keyboard dock, I can plug in a mouse and get a cursor on the tablet screen which supports normal highlight-cut-n-paste. In editable text fields in almost every app, the usual shortcuts for cut-n-paste (Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V) work fine, as does shift-cursor key highlighting.

No doubt that phones make these operations hard/impossible, but it's not a limitation of Android, as the Asus Transformer demonstrates. So I don't think this is really a fair criticism of Android as a platform. If you pair the author's Samsung Galaxy S3 phone to a bluetooth keyboard, I would expect the author's user-experience to be much improved.