vB Easy Archive - How does the iphone work?

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How does the iphone work?
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Posted by: mobilephonie

Howdy all.

I have a question or two regarding the Iphone and Macs. I bought an Ipod Touch to play with for 30 days...to see if I'm going to jump to Iphone 2. I was wondering if yall could help me out. I don't understand how a mac/iphone manages memory.

They both run mac OS x(?); with the iphone running a much smaller version. I understand that part.

I don't understand why you don't have to close programs on the iphone. Does it "flush" out what you're not using? Does it close when I hit the back button?

I'm a hard-core, very informed, PC user. However, I am totally ignorant to the theory of Apple OS.

Thank you in advance.

Posted by: XanderMac

the apps run in the background eating up the limited memory until something crashes. That's my experience anyway.

Posted by: Crims0nC0de

Quote:

Originally Posted by XanderMac

the apps run in the background eating up the limited memory until something crashes. That's my experience anyway.

So there is no way to close any of the programs once your done with them? Wow, thats lame! Hopefully they will fix this for the new version, cause I'd like to get one but if this is not going to change I'm not sure that I can deal with it crashing because of something stupid like that.

Posted by: XanderMac

You can press and hold the home button for 6-10 seconds and force an app to quit, but if you do this whit the iPod you will lose any metadata (playcount etc.)

Posted by: Quake97

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crims0nC0de

It's called multitasking and multithreading. Do you really need to close applications on your PC or Mac? Yeah, if you're running a TON of stuff, but considering the lightweight nature of a smartphone, it's not as necessary.

Joe

Posted by: Haas_Dave

It will also close items when the memory is needed. In earlier firmware versions, there was a memory leak in Safari that caused the iPod app to force close many times while Safari was used. Those issues has been a lot less frequent with more recent firmwares, but it shows what the OS will do in 'closing applications.'
Apps using the SDK will close on exit by hitting the home button according to requirements for AppStore inclusion, so other safeguards seem to be in place to hinder memory leaks.

These safeguards have worked a lot better than other OSes that forces most items to die horribly when unused (*cough*WM*cough*).

Posted by: KDarling

Depends on the app.

Most, like the calculator and YouTube, save state and exit whenever you hit the Home button. When they are launched again, they reload their saved state.

Some continue in the background, like the mail checker and iPod app.

By controlling the number of background apps, and making most exit on user task switching, Apple hopes to avoid memory conflicts.

The downside is that relaunching, especially say a game, will take longer than just switching to one that's simply paused in the background. It also makes things more complicated for the programmers, who might avoid saving state and simply do a restart from scratch each time.

It helps that it has 128MB of memory for apps. WM phones with 128MB rarely have problems either.

Posted by: Crims0nC0de

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quake97

I understand that and no, when I'm only using a few apps, I don't bother closing them when going to another. But I was taking from the post that I quoted that it would cause the iPhone to crash, and that is not something that helps convince me to buy one. That's all I was saying, that if it did cause system instability then it's something they need to fix. Since I don't currently on one I couldn't go on anything other than what the previous poster had said.