Moreover, it appears that the iPhone will have far more functional, general purpose cut and paste before the Pre expands its functionality beyond text entry fields.
Which, given that Palm has been in the handheld business as long as anyone, could be considered "hilarious", I guess. I don't, but, you know......
Yes you are right.. Palm only made the right decisions after that Ruinstein took over..
But Palm and Apple have been going back and forth for a long time. Don't forget about the Newton versus the Palm classic.. And how Apple took engineers from Palm to start off with.. Steve Jobs even wanted to buy Palm at one point..
Palm today reminds me a lot about Apple when Steve Jobs took over.. The stock was low and Amelio got Steve on board who took control of the company... and now it's Ed Colligan calling Jon Rubinstein who is taking control over Palm!
They have ripped it apart and now are putting it back together..
I shouldn't have responded to that whole hilarious comment
It's an average from all iPhone users. Which means some users have far more than 100 and some users have far less
I have DLed several hundred, but thought that I only load about 40. I checked my iPhone, I have 6 pages. At 16 per page, not including the bottom row, that is 96 apps. But the last page is only half full and their are nearly a page of default apps from Apple, so the number is around 80. Surprisingly to me, I use all these apps on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. About 15 of them are used repeatedly everyday. Crazy being so off on the apps you use. Now imagine if all of them were running on my iPhone.
I’m not one to keep apps I’m not using so I’d say that number is pretty accurate.
It's an average from all iPhone users. Which means some users have far more than 100 and some users have far less
Uh, right. How many users have far more than 100? Considering the absolute max you can get on there is 9 pages (which works out to 144 new apps I think) you clearly are making things up. There's no way enough users have 44 extra apps to make up for all the users who have downloaded only a handful. No chance. Find a source for that claim.
I shouldn't have responded to that whole hilarious comment
If anyone who is a fan of the Pre is touting it's copy and paste and iPhone's lack of it, that's pitiful. The fact that you can only copy and paste from text entry fields means it's essentially worthless! How pitiful. You're right, you shouldn't have replied to the comment because there's no defending a brand new OS coming out today having such a half baked implementation of copy and paste. This is exactly what makes many people so confident about Apple - they don't do half baked. Users who buy a Pre because they were looking for something with copy and paste will be upset and will contribute to general bad word of mouth. Hilarious!
Wow this is some BS, my summer home is on Martha's Vineyard, and I have several cellphones, my iPhone works just fine.
I talk about 1-2 hours a day on the phone, my verizon windows mobile devices often freeze up and you can't even push the "answer" button because the device has run out of memory (RAM). Yes the iphone eats battery, but i can tell you right now, I spent 4 hours on the phone last night, and this morning i made about a 10 minute call. It gave me the 20% battery warning, (total 3 days).
I'm guessing your friends do charge there's at night. What you don't take way from this, is you see all kinds of problems with the iPhone, yet your friends continue to use them. Must be something really, really special about the iPhone.
One of the windows mobile touch phones i have, isn't even touch, sure people think they get a touchscreen phone that it's like windows mobile, but it's nothing like it. You can just push on the screen, you can't move your fingers. It makes touch screens appear to suck in general, and they think "it has touch like the iphone!" it's nothing like it.
I'm a blackberry addict who uses his iPhone way more. I can type faster on the iPhone that my blackberry. I generally keep it as a backup device.
I travel about 4 days a week, and the iPhone last longer than a day, my business is calling clients, and traveling, I think I'd have a pretty reasonable idea of battery life. I can tell you pound for pound, all my windows phones dye first, and my blackberry bites it usually before my iphone depending on the tasks.
The iPhone is an amazing device, I was very resistant to it and bought it as a "new toy" to play with because it was all over the news. Now I can't use any other phone, because there's so many little problems with it. The iPhone is the first phone I don't swear at everyday.
Apple managed to accomplish in two years what blackberry, and microsoft (with billions of dollars) haven't done in 10 years. They should be embarrassed! I've bitched for 10 years about having a browser on the mobile phone, microsoft and blackberry either hate their customers or are lazy.
Doing an update on those phones are nightmares, I still cant' get my berry to twitter client to install after update.
Quote:
Originally Posted by teckstud
These fanboys make me laugh so hard. Every iPhone user I know in NYC:
1.) Has to constantly (daily) recharge their iPhone or leave it plugged in while using it. CONSTANTLY.
2.) At the beach houses none of them get a signal- either Martha's Vineyard or Fire Island- their phone just don't work!
3.) My friend just got back from Hawaii and said his Verizon phone was the only one in his group that got a signal. No iPhones could maintain a call. People were borrowing his phone.;
Summary- both the Battery life and AT&T are a joke.
Copy and Paste is not my number one criteria. I rarely thought about it during my time with the iPhone..
Besides - you never know.. the Pre may have a more powerful copy/paste implementation by the time Apple releases 3.0...
And I'm not trying to defend the PRE. There is another feature that they are missing that is in iPhone 3.0 - UNDO.. I just requested it..
Quote:
Originally Posted by cameronj
If anyone who is a fan of the Pre is touting it's copy and paste and iPhone's lack of it, that's pitiful. The fact that you can only copy and paste from text entry fields means it's essentially worthless! How pitiful. You're right, you shouldn't have replied to the comment because there's no defending a brand new OS coming out today having such a half baked implementation of copy and paste. This is exactly what makes many people so confident about Apple - they don't do half baked. Users who buy a Pre because they were looking for something with copy and paste will be upset and will contribute to general bad word of mouth. Hilarious!
No, actually I didn't. That came from a survey of iPhone users. I don't remember the exact number but it was around 100. I'll see if I can dig it up.
You did make it up.
Some VERY simple math would have told you your number was ridiculous, not to mention common sense.
First, common sense.
You REALLY think the AVERAGE user runs around with fully 7 PAGES of apps? I'm not talking about your nerdy friends. I'm talking about the average dummy in the bar with the iPhone. 7 PAGES??
OK now for the easy math.
Apple has sold 1 billion apps. Apple had sold 37 million touch handhelds as of April 23.
Can you do the math from there?
Feel free to adjust that number for the apps that are downloaded and then uninstalled.
The actual number of apps on the average user's iPhone is under 20.
So you don't have to quit one in order to launch the other. Can you imagine not being able to run iCal and Address book at the same time on the Mac?
The system resources and screen space are available to make this practical on a computer. There isn't as much point on a phone.
Quote:
True, but I think that the WebOS makes this complexity simpler than any other platform out there. The cards UI is kind of like using expose on the Mac.
I agree the cards UI is a good development. At the same time it's essentially the same UI as Safari on the iPhone.
Quote:
Push notifications are great - the PRE has them also. I just don't like how it can pop up a window and disrupt what you are doing.
The Pre has notifications, but Palm does not have an API and push notifications service the same as Apple. It's also possible Apple may introduce a new notifications UI to deal with multiple messages. Apple often doesn't show new UI's until the software is ready to launch.
Quote:
It just much faster and more fluid to switch between cards than it is to quit and launch apps on the iPhone.
That's because it's quicker to switch web pages than it is to switch apps built on Objective-C and Open GL.
For one it's not my number. I told you saw it in a survey.
The survey was only for iPhone's, not all touch devices.
App Store apps are not the only option for screen icons. There are thousands of web apps and web based services one can use on the iPhone. So no the number of apps sold does not tell the full story of the number of apps and services on the average iPhone.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cameronj
You did make it up.
Some VERY simple math would have told you your number was ridiculous, not to mention common sense.
You REALLY think the AVERAGE user runs around with fully 7 PAGES of apps? I'm not talking about your nerdy friends. I'm talking about the average dummy in the bar with the iPhone. 7 PAGES??
Apple has sold 1 billion apps. Apple had sold 37 million touch handhelds as of April 23.
Can you do the math from there?
The actual number of apps on the average user's iPhone is under 20.
For one it's not my number. I told you saw it in a survey.
The survey was only for iPhone's, not all touch devices.
App Store apps are not the only option for screen icons. There are thousands of web apps and web based services one can use on the iPhone. So no the number of apps sold does not tell the full story of the number of apps and services on the average iPhone.
Right, you didn't make it up, you "saw it somewhere" which you can't seem to find anymore. Oh and the number happens to be almost an order of magnitude out of the realm of possibility.
Jesus, just give up. Your 100 number clearly didn't come from anywhere. What makes you think that iPhones have more apps installed (that's what we were talking about, not "icons on the phone, which the average user CLEARLY has 80 of compared to their 20 apps) than iPod touches?
Just give it up, admit that you remembered it wrong. That's obviously the case. When presented with overwhelming evidence, to continue to deny just makes you look like you can't process information.
I think the best thing to do is compare the iPhone that Apple will announce tomorrow with the Pre that Palm released yesterday. I am not happy with my current iPhone experience of quitting and launching apps.. Even after you quit, you have to find the app. Switching between apps on the Pre has been incredibly fluid to me..
You can even do one swipe across the gesture area to go to adjacent cards.. Just one swipe...
Sure, and I'm certainly not going to second guess your experience with your Pre, as I don't even own one.
However, the larger context of the multitasking debate is about tradeoffs. Apple chose a heavier duty OS , which left fewer resources available for things like multitasking, because (I believe) they have big plans for this platform and intend to grow its functionality as the hardware gets more capable.
Palm chose "fluid", by using a much lighter weight OS, which may have some issues with expanding on the platform.
I'm guessing that, from Apple's perspective, the kind of interaction you're talking about wasn't a big enough win to throttle their OS right out of the gate. As has been mentioned, it's likely that Apple will implement some form of multitasking as soon as they believe they have the hardware to support it in the way that they want.
At that point the iPhone will match the Pre in this respect, but the Pre will still be saddled with a light weight OS that may not be up to the heavy lifting that I believe people will come to see as the norm in a hand held computer.
It's the difference between a long term strategy and better get something on the market that has instant appeal or we're toast.
And the Pre has a lot of appeal, no doubt. But I just helped a friend balance his new home theater system by using a db meter app on the iPhone, and it's not clear to me at this point that the Pre will ever be capable of that kind of thing.
Not that everybody needs or wants that, but I can't help but suspect that once the average consumer gets a taste of a general purpose computing device with a vast array of apps in the palm of his hand (as it were), they'll find it harder to settle for "can do a few things really well", any more.
I can see both sides also and I think it's silly to call the Pre users to call it the iPhone killer and it's silly for iPhone users to call Pre a gimmick. I'm amazed at how some of the posts I'm reading seem almost like a war between religions. There is a good sized market for both devices and the design/philosophy of the PRE vibes really well for the way I would use the device. It's so nice that Apple finally has competition so they are motivated to use their billions and do something about it!
i agree 100%. the only reason i have pointed out a few issues with the Pre is to highlight the hypocrisy of an iPhone hater or two hereabouts... competition is good, anything that pushes apple to keep improving the iPhone can only be good for those of us who use it.
I haven’t heard about this. It’s proven to be a complete setup for Apple to tie all apps into a PN server. Are you talking about Push email, SMS and voicemails, or a systemwide PN service that allows all 3rd-party developers tie into? Besides the complexity I wouldn’t think they would even consider such a solution since they are pushing background apps so heavily.
The Pre's push notification seems pretty sophisticated. It's called the mojo messaging service. Here's a link on it:
I am a hardware and software engineer and I have to say there's a lot of misunderstanding about multitasking going on.
Before I get started, it might be interesting to readers with jailbroken iPhones to ssh into their phones and run 'top.' You will see that at any given time, the iPhone is running around 20 (?) different processes. Some of the names are recognizable--the phone app, the mail app, the SMS app, etc. I don't know what the others do. But the point is that the iPhone is actually constantly doing quite a bit of multitasking.
And a second point before starting: people claiming that other smartphones like Windows Mobile and S60 can multitask are definitely right. I have owned both and they certainly multitask--and no, this is not fake multitasking where apps simply "appear" to be running. It's quite real. And there should be no reason to doubt this. Cell phone hardware is now higher spec'ed than desktop computers from 12 years ago, which could certainly multitask.
Okay...
The first oft-repeated fallacy here is that the iPhone processor is simply not fast enough to handle multitasking. Multitasking does not imply any level of processor usage. Notice that on any desktop computer, you can open a dozen different apps and run Task Manager, or Activity Monitor, and see that CPU usage is just a couple percent, depending on which apps you open. Fact is, most apps are idle most of the time and consume next to zero CPU resources. Apps on the iPhone which remain open in the background, like Safari (sometimes) or the Phone app are almost always idle and do not slow down your foreground processes.
The second fallacy is that the iPhone does not have enough RAM to multitask. This ignores the idea of virtual memory. The iPhone has over 4GB of flash that can be used for virtual memory--the fact that it "only" has 128MB of RAM is not necessarily a concern. (Although depending on the flash memory controller Apple uses, they may have chosen to disable virtual memory due to poor random-write performance or wear-leveling algorithms. If so, that was a willful decision and not a technical limitation.)
So Apple's (and others') claim that the iPhone does not have enough processor power or memory to multitask is bogus. The problem is really a usability issue. Right now the user model is very simple. To start an app, tap it from springboard. To quit an app, press the home button. As soon as you allow multitasking, you have to create UI to determine if you want to quit an app, or leave it running in the background, or (presumably) to pause it but leave it open. And you need UI to show which apps are running, and ideally which ones are consuming resources that are potentially slowing down the phone, and have UI to change the state of the running apps. Apple clearly did not want to spend the time designing this UI and software, or they felt it was unnecessary for users to be bothered with this functionality. Palm went a different route with the Pre and they seem to have done a good job. I applaud them for that because multitasking is a very nice feature, even (especially?) on a phone. (If you haven't used a phone with a multitasking OS, you may not realize how nice it is and in how many different situations it's useful.)
Comments
Seriously?!!? People really load that many apps? Wow! Clearly I'm holding the average down.
Moreover, it appears that the iPhone will have far more functional, general purpose cut and paste before the Pre expands its functionality beyond text entry fields.
Which, given that Palm has been in the handheld business as long as anyone, could be considered "hilarious", I guess. I don't, but, you know......
Yes you are right.. Palm only made the right decisions after that Ruinstein took over..
But Palm and Apple have been going back and forth for a long time. Don't forget about the Newton versus the Palm classic.. And how Apple took engineers from Palm to start off with.. Steve Jobs even wanted to buy Palm at one point..
Palm today reminds me a lot about Apple when Steve Jobs took over.. The stock was low and Amelio got Steve on board who took control of the company... and now it's Ed Colligan calling Jon Rubinstein who is taking control over Palm!
They have ripped it apart and now are putting it back together..
I shouldn't have responded to that whole hilarious comment
Tenobell made that number up
It's an average from all iPhone users. Which means some users have far more than 100 and some users have far less
I have DLed several hundred, but thought that I only load about 40. I checked my iPhone, I have 6 pages. At 16 per page, not including the bottom row, that is 96 apps. But the last page is only half full and their are nearly a page of default apps from Apple, so the number is around 80. Surprisingly to me, I use all these apps on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. About 15 of them are used repeatedly everyday. Crazy being so off on the apps you use. Now imagine if all of them were running on my iPhone.
I’m not one to keep apps I’m not using so I’d say that number is pretty accurate.
What is more hilarious is that the Palm Pre has cut and paste before the iPhone!
It's an average from all iPhone users. Which means some users have far more than 100 and some users have far less
Uh, right. How many users have far more than 100? Considering the absolute max you can get on there is 9 pages (which works out to 144 new apps I think) you clearly are making things up. There's no way enough users have 44 extra apps to make up for all the users who have downloaded only a handful. No chance. Find a source for that claim.
I shouldn't have responded to that whole hilarious comment
If anyone who is a fan of the Pre is touting it's copy and paste and iPhone's lack of it, that's pitiful. The fact that you can only copy and paste from text entry fields means it's essentially worthless! How pitiful. You're right, you shouldn't have replied to the comment because there's no defending a brand new OS coming out today having such a half baked implementation of copy and paste. This is exactly what makes many people so confident about Apple - they don't do half baked. Users who buy a Pre because they were looking for something with copy and paste will be upset and will contribute to general bad word of mouth. Hilarious!
I talk about 1-2 hours a day on the phone, my verizon windows mobile devices often freeze up and you can't even push the "answer" button because the device has run out of memory (RAM). Yes the iphone eats battery, but i can tell you right now, I spent 4 hours on the phone last night, and this morning i made about a 10 minute call. It gave me the 20% battery warning, (total 3 days).
I'm guessing your friends do charge there's at night. What you don't take way from this, is you see all kinds of problems with the iPhone, yet your friends continue to use them. Must be something really, really special about the iPhone.
One of the windows mobile touch phones i have, isn't even touch, sure people think they get a touchscreen phone that it's like windows mobile, but it's nothing like it. You can just push on the screen, you can't move your fingers. It makes touch screens appear to suck in general, and they think "it has touch like the iphone!" it's nothing like it.
I'm a blackberry addict who uses his iPhone way more. I can type faster on the iPhone that my blackberry. I generally keep it as a backup device.
I travel about 4 days a week, and the iPhone last longer than a day, my business is calling clients, and traveling, I think I'd have a pretty reasonable idea of battery life. I can tell you pound for pound, all my windows phones dye first, and my blackberry bites it usually before my iphone depending on the tasks.
The iPhone is an amazing device, I was very resistant to it and bought it as a "new toy" to play with because it was all over the news. Now I can't use any other phone, because there's so many little problems with it. The iPhone is the first phone I don't swear at everyday.
Apple managed to accomplish in two years what blackberry, and microsoft (with billions of dollars) haven't done in 10 years. They should be embarrassed! I've bitched for 10 years about having a browser on the mobile phone, microsoft and blackberry either hate their customers or are lazy.
Doing an update on those phones are nightmares, I still cant' get my berry to twitter client to install after update.
These fanboys make me laugh so hard. Every iPhone user I know in NYC:
1.) Has to constantly (daily) recharge their iPhone or leave it plugged in while using it. CONSTANTLY.
2.) At the beach houses none of them get a signal- either Martha's Vineyard or Fire Island- their phone just don't work!
3.) My friend just got back from Hawaii and said his Verizon phone was the only one in his group that got a signal. No iPhones could maintain a call. People were borrowing his phone.;
Summary- both the Battery life and AT&T are a joke.
Copy and Paste is not my number one criteria. I rarely thought about it during my time with the iPhone..
Besides - you never know.. the Pre may have a more powerful copy/paste implementation by the time Apple releases 3.0...
And I'm not trying to defend the PRE. There is another feature that they are missing that is in iPhone 3.0 - UNDO.. I just requested it..
If anyone who is a fan of the Pre is touting it's copy and paste and iPhone's lack of it, that's pitiful. The fact that you can only copy and paste from text entry fields means it's essentially worthless! How pitiful. You're right, you shouldn't have replied to the comment because there's no defending a brand new OS coming out today having such a half baked implementation of copy and paste. This is exactly what makes many people so confident about Apple - they don't do half baked. Users who buy a Pre because they were looking for something with copy and paste will be upset and will contribute to general bad word of mouth. Hilarious!
No, actually I didn't. That came from a survey of iPhone users. I don't remember the exact number but it was around 100. I'll see if I can dig it up.
You did make it up.
Some VERY simple math would have told you your number was ridiculous, not to mention common sense.
First, common sense.
You REALLY think the AVERAGE user runs around with fully 7 PAGES of apps? I'm not talking about your nerdy friends. I'm talking about the average dummy in the bar with the iPhone. 7 PAGES??
OK now for the easy math.
Apple has sold 1 billion apps. Apple had sold 37 million touch handhelds as of April 23.
Can you do the math from there?
Feel free to adjust that number for the apps that are downloaded and then uninstalled.
The actual number of apps on the average user's iPhone is under 20.
Well admin can contact his isp . And complain about his abusive language. No?
Good thing for you people don't get banned for making barely-literate posts.
d
Besides - you never know.. the Pre may have a more powerful copy/paste implementation by the time Apple releases 3.0...
you mean by tomorrow?
sorry. i couldn't resist. i know copy/paste isn't the be all end all for you. i. just couldn't resist.
So you don't have to quit one in order to launch the other. Can you imagine not being able to run iCal and Address book at the same time on the Mac?
The system resources and screen space are available to make this practical on a computer. There isn't as much point on a phone.
True, but I think that the WebOS makes this complexity simpler than any other platform out there. The cards UI is kind of like using expose on the Mac.
I agree the cards UI is a good development. At the same time it's essentially the same UI as Safari on the iPhone.
Push notifications are great - the PRE has them also. I just don't like how it can pop up a window and disrupt what you are doing.
The Pre has notifications, but Palm does not have an API and push notifications service the same as Apple. It's also possible Apple may introduce a new notifications UI to deal with multiple messages. Apple often doesn't show new UI's until the software is ready to launch.
It just much faster and more fluid to switch between cards than it is to quit and launch apps on the iPhone.
That's because it's quicker to switch web pages than it is to switch apps built on Objective-C and Open GL.
you mean by tomorrow?
sorry. i couldn't resist. i know copy/paste isn't the be all end all for you. i. just couldn't resist.
hmm.. I wouldn't bet on 3.0 being released tomorrow.
The survey was only for iPhone's, not all touch devices.
App Store apps are not the only option for screen icons. There are thousands of web apps and web based services one can use on the iPhone. So no the number of apps sold does not tell the full story of the number of apps and services on the average iPhone.
You did make it up.
Some VERY simple math would have told you your number was ridiculous, not to mention common sense.
You REALLY think the AVERAGE user runs around with fully 7 PAGES of apps? I'm not talking about your nerdy friends. I'm talking about the average dummy in the bar with the iPhone. 7 PAGES??
Apple has sold 1 billion apps. Apple had sold 37 million touch handhelds as of April 23.
Can you do the math from there?
The actual number of apps on the average user's iPhone is under 20.
For one it's not my number. I told you saw it in a survey.
The survey was only for iPhone's, not all touch devices.
App Store apps are not the only option for screen icons. There are thousands of web apps and web based services one can use on the iPhone. So no the number of apps sold does not tell the full story of the number of apps and services on the average iPhone.
Right, you didn't make it up, you "saw it somewhere" which you can't seem to find anymore. Oh and the number happens to be almost an order of magnitude out of the realm of possibility.
Jesus, just give up. Your 100 number clearly didn't come from anywhere. What makes you think that iPhones have more apps installed (that's what we were talking about, not "icons on the phone, which the average user CLEARLY has 80 of compared to their 20 apps) than iPod touches?
Just give it up, admit that you remembered it wrong. That's obviously the case. When presented with overwhelming evidence, to continue to deny just makes you look like you can't process information.
I think the best thing to do is compare the iPhone that Apple will announce tomorrow with the Pre that Palm released yesterday. I am not happy with my current iPhone experience of quitting and launching apps.. Even after you quit, you have to find the app. Switching between apps on the Pre has been incredibly fluid to me..
You can even do one swipe across the gesture area to go to adjacent cards.. Just one swipe...
Sure, and I'm certainly not going to second guess your experience with your Pre, as I don't even own one.
However, the larger context of the multitasking debate is about tradeoffs. Apple chose a heavier duty OS , which left fewer resources available for things like multitasking, because (I believe) they have big plans for this platform and intend to grow its functionality as the hardware gets more capable.
Palm chose "fluid", by using a much lighter weight OS, which may have some issues with expanding on the platform.
I'm guessing that, from Apple's perspective, the kind of interaction you're talking about wasn't a big enough win to throttle their OS right out of the gate. As has been mentioned, it's likely that Apple will implement some form of multitasking as soon as they believe they have the hardware to support it in the way that they want.
At that point the iPhone will match the Pre in this respect, but the Pre will still be saddled with a light weight OS that may not be up to the heavy lifting that I believe people will come to see as the norm in a hand held computer.
It's the difference between a long term strategy and better get something on the market that has instant appeal or we're toast.
And the Pre has a lot of appeal, no doubt. But I just helped a friend balance his new home theater system by using a db meter app on the iPhone, and it's not clear to me at this point that the Pre will ever be capable of that kind of thing.
Not that everybody needs or wants that, but I can't help but suspect that once the average consumer gets a taste of a general purpose computing device with a vast array of apps in the palm of his hand (as it were), they'll find it harder to settle for "can do a few things really well", any more.
I can see both sides also and I think it's silly to call the Pre users to call it the iPhone killer and it's silly for iPhone users to call Pre a gimmick. I'm amazed at how some of the posts I'm reading seem almost like a war between religions. There is a good sized market for both devices and the design/philosophy of the PRE vibes really well for the way I would use the device. It's so nice that Apple finally has competition so they are motivated to use their billions and do something about it!
i agree 100%. the only reason i have pointed out a few issues with the Pre is to highlight the hypocrisy of an iPhone hater or two hereabouts... competition is good, anything that pushes apple to keep improving the iPhone can only be good for those of us who use it.
I haven’t heard about this. It’s proven to be a complete setup for Apple to tie all apps into a PN server. Are you talking about Push email, SMS and voicemails, or a systemwide PN service that allows all 3rd-party developers tie into? Besides the complexity I wouldn’t think they would even consider such a solution since they are pushing background apps so heavily.
The Pre's push notification seems pretty sophisticated. It's called the mojo messaging service. Here's a link on it:
http://www.precentral.net/palm-introduce-push-services
Before I get started, it might be interesting to readers with jailbroken iPhones to ssh into their phones and run 'top.' You will see that at any given time, the iPhone is running around 20 (?) different processes. Some of the names are recognizable--the phone app, the mail app, the SMS app, etc. I don't know what the others do. But the point is that the iPhone is actually constantly doing quite a bit of multitasking.
And a second point before starting: people claiming that other smartphones like Windows Mobile and S60 can multitask are definitely right. I have owned both and they certainly multitask--and no, this is not fake multitasking where apps simply "appear" to be running. It's quite real. And there should be no reason to doubt this. Cell phone hardware is now higher spec'ed than desktop computers from 12 years ago, which could certainly multitask.
Okay...
The first oft-repeated fallacy here is that the iPhone processor is simply not fast enough to handle multitasking. Multitasking does not imply any level of processor usage. Notice that on any desktop computer, you can open a dozen different apps and run Task Manager, or Activity Monitor, and see that CPU usage is just a couple percent, depending on which apps you open. Fact is, most apps are idle most of the time and consume next to zero CPU resources. Apps on the iPhone which remain open in the background, like Safari (sometimes) or the Phone app are almost always idle and do not slow down your foreground processes.
The second fallacy is that the iPhone does not have enough RAM to multitask. This ignores the idea of virtual memory. The iPhone has over 4GB of flash that can be used for virtual memory--the fact that it "only" has 128MB of RAM is not necessarily a concern. (Although depending on the flash memory controller Apple uses, they may have chosen to disable virtual memory due to poor random-write performance or wear-leveling algorithms. If so, that was a willful decision and not a technical limitation.)
So Apple's (and others') claim that the iPhone does not have enough processor power or memory to multitask is bogus. The problem is really a usability issue. Right now the user model is very simple. To start an app, tap it from springboard. To quit an app, press the home button. As soon as you allow multitasking, you have to create UI to determine if you want to quit an app, or leave it running in the background, or (presumably) to pause it but leave it open. And you need UI to show which apps are running, and ideally which ones are consuming resources that are potentially slowing down the phone, and have UI to change the state of the running apps. Apple clearly did not want to spend the time designing this UI and software, or they felt it was unnecessary for users to be bothered with this functionality. Palm went a different route with the Pre and they seem to have done a good job. I applaud them for that because multitasking is a very nice feature, even (especially?) on a phone. (If you haven't used a phone with a multitasking OS, you may not realize how nice it is and in how many different situations it's useful.)