All cell services try to bone you in every way they possibly can. Verizon is now requiring a lot of their phones (relative to probably 6 months ago) to have a 9.99 or higher data package. Basically if the phone calls people only, it doesn't require a data plan. Anything above that, even just texting phones, require a data plan.

I hate all cell phone companies. But I have verizon because of the "map".

_________________

Around Buffalo, AT&T isn't so bad. Data service gorks on occasion, but overall not terrible.

Last weekend when I was in Boston, it was pretty weak for the most part. Choppy data service, dropped a good number of calls in areas where I had full bars, pretty weak.

Multitasking has been avoided by Apple because of battery concerns. Based on my Palm 700wx, that seems legit to me. (I never had a CrackBerry, so I have no comparative reference there. ) With the next iPhone, they'll obviously be using their A4 chip (same one that's in the iPad) because of it's extremely low power use when paired with the iPhone OS, so that opens the multitasking door.

Check out how awesome multitasking is going to be on the next iPhone:

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/31/iph ... titasking/

_________________
Wheelhouse

So...the iPhone gets expose and growl and iPhone users get a 30 minute battery life?

Meh, besides talking and browsing at the same time I'd say you're using the wrong device to multitask.

_________________
Hold my beer and watch this...

I don't think Apple would do this without a good solution for battery life.

What makes me more excited about this possibility Ed, is that this also means the iPad will have multitasking... making it much more like a laptop.

Even their licensing agreement suggests the first major software update will be free for iPad in the developer packs, which makes sense seeing how the iPad just came out and people would be pissed if they had to pay for that upgrade.

Time will tell, but I'm sure they've found a solution. Steve Jobs doesn't do things half assed.

_________________
Wheelhouse

If the power savings that the A4 CPU is purported to bring are accurate, multitasking won't be a battery destroyer. Obviously the true numbers remain to be seen. Hopefully someone can run some numbers off the iPad once it's out there.

It all depends what apps you're multitasking.

Awesome battery and CPU design can't compensate for poor 3rd party software development

_________________
Hold my beer and watch this...

I definitely enjoyed having the expanded battery/case on my iPhone (while I had it). The no multitasking thing sucked balls though.

_________________

Hence the power of Apple's approval process.

_________________
Wheelhouse

This is true. I'd expect Apple to consider that when reviewing apps for the app store, and make decisions at approval time if an app will be allowed to multitask or not.

There's actually some apps out there that are pseudo-multitasking by hooking into the Apple provided apps which ARE allowed to multitask.

from everything I've read their approval process is focused on aesthetics and fault tolerance, not efficiency.

_________________
Hold my beer and watch this...

Their approval process is ...... not my most favorite thing. They're pretty inconsistent on some types of decisions though.

They will go through your code fairly in depth, and will reject for things that they don't like.

For example, let's assume you wrote something , and created an object method named 'Shitface', and wrote your own code for it. It works just fine.

However, deep within the bowels of the the iPhone OS, there's a protected object method named 'Shitface', one that you cannot access directly anyways.

Your app will get rejected simply for sharing the same method name, even though you're not trying to call the protected one.

(Hope that makes sense.... :p )