Should take about 1-2 secs… either way.

You know the battery life of *ALL* phones?
And all the things EVERY user has turned on/off?
And you know *ALL* iphones last less than *ALL* other phones?

Wow. You are smart!

Apple took a great idea… and then left out a lot of handy stuff.

Yes my phone is jailbroken, no I don’t have any problems because of it, the iPhone 3GS has more than enough memory to run several apps at the same time and I have many apps that I love but just would not be possible if everything was controlled by Apple and AT&T. Take control of your phone that you pay for and use it to its full potential.

Simple question: why does an app on the same device, when it needs to display a reminder to the user, has to connect to a server, so that server will later a push a notification to the phone?

If each such notification requires a trip to the server, that’s also wasteful.

FYI: Palm is currently putting in place a similar push infrastructure, but it has not been rolled out yet. For the kind of notifications such as Facebook updates, this makes sense.

However, Apple is also requiring a round trip to the internet just to display an alert box on the screen, while on the Pre, an app registers the time of notification with a scheduler. When the time comes, the application is launched to display the notification. Those notifications are often interactive, the user can perform some operations on them, such as dismiss or snooze an alert without switching to that app.

I find the requirement of apps on the same device to register a notification on a remote server, just to display a message to the user utterly ridiculous.

5 background applications. Each opens a socket to a server each gets a time slice from the CPU each has to be loaded into memory.

5 push notification applications, register with Apple’s push server and a single process sits in memory listening.

How big of a difference is this? How is ram released and allocated to give room for the foreground task. How many security holes are created via each method.

I’m sorry, but there is a real difference I would just like to see someone try to quantify it.

Test the Pre with no background applications for battery life and check the iPhone 3Gs. Now run a series of background applications and similar push applications on each phone and send nothing and see how it affects things.

Finally test both again but this time every 15 send a different alert and have the user respond to it. See how quickly each delivers the data and see how it affects each for battery.

THEN WE WILL KNOW!

Hear hear!

I wanted to say the same as you do. My BB has BeeJive IM and realtime notification including multitasking AND a 2 day battery life for two years now.

And beside that I leave Facebook, Google Maps, Viigo, etc. all open.

But on a BlackBerry you have multitasking, real-time push AND a better battery life than the Pre/3GS.
On top of that the reliability of the real-time push is guaranteed. Last year (correct me if I am wrong), the service uptime was more than 99.8% with 8 months at 100% uptime.

So it seems possible.

Surely there’ll be scenario who required multi-tasking.

Just because Apple doesn’t support it, or have limited support doesn’t mean they have the right answer.