Subscribe via RSS Feed

iOS 4.2 – Can the iPad Really Handle Multitasking?

By | November 4, 2010 | 8 comments
Share |

iOS 4 made its debut several months ago, with the introduction of the iPhone 4, and brought long awaited features, such as folders, and most of all, multitasking. Since then, iPad owners have been patiently waiting for iOS 4 to be ported to their device, but somehow, it took more than 4 months for the iOS development team to finalize the iPad version.

Why did it take that long? Besides the fact that the OS needed to be tweaked to deal with the added real estate, bringing iOS 4.2 to the iPad likely presented a huge challenge with regard to memory management: the iPhone 4 sports a comfortable amount of memory, 512MB of eDRAM, while the iPad only features half of that, 256MB – by today’s standards, 256MB is not much, even for an optimized mobile operating system such as iOS.

Until the release of iOS 4, memory management did not really present an issue on the iPad, as the lack of multitasking helped keep the OS and apps memory footprint low. Now that iOS 4.2 is available to developers, we decided to run some tests to see if the iPad can really handle the new OS, and actually lives up to our expectations. For our tests, we used the exact same iPad, with the exact same apps installed on the device, and performed tests with iOS 3.2.2, then upgraded the iPad to 4.2, and ran the exact same tests. All tests were ran using freshly rebooted iPads (home+sleep keys held until a complete reboot), and we ran the following apps one after the other:

  • Safari
  • Mail
  • Settings
  • Photos
  • App Store
  • Exo-Planet
  • Epic Citadel
  • iSSH
  • Angry Birds HD
  • Cut the Rope HD
  • GPS Drive HD
  • Air Video
  • NPR
  • Netflix
  • aMonitor

With the iPad running iOS 3.2.2, aMonitor showed the following:

With the same iPad upgraded to iOS 4.2, aMonitor showed the following:

Surprisingly, while the apps we launched on the iPad running iOS 4.2 all appeared on the multitasking bar and were therefore running to some extent, the memory footprint on the upgraded iPad was significantly lower than what we saw with 3.2.2. In other words, it appears that iOS 4.2 is doing a great job at allocating and managing the device’s memory, when compared to the older versions.

Long story short, iOS 4.2 seems to have been worth the wait. Folders, multitasking, and better memory management, there is not much to complain about the new version of the OS. On a side note, rumor has it that next Tuesday is the official launch date for iOS 4.2…

email

About dag: Certified geek

  • jeff

    Any word on when the jailbreak for 4.2 will be ready for primetime? (i.e. cydia will work properly, etc.)

  • PRS

    Flawed analysis. Most of those apps have not yet been updated for iOS 4.2 and don’t use any of the multitasking APIs, so they weren’t running. Check the processes to see which tasks were actually occupying memory.

    • http://www.padgadget.com dag

      You bring up a good point, but regardless of the fact that these apps use the multitasking API (or not), the memory footprint is still better with iOS 4.2. As for your comment about multitasking support, the following processes were still running on the 4.2 iPad: MobileSafari / AppStore / Preferences / AirVideo / iSSH / aMonitor / MobileMail. In other words, besides the native iPad apps, at least 3 third party apps were still running. Some of these apps are universal apps, and already use multitasking APIs, since they already run on iOS 4.1 via the iPhone.

  • Walt French

    I presume that iOS 4.2 gets merged back into the iPhone line, so *maybe?* this’ll address some of the management on the 3G?

  • Craig

    The 3GS also has 256MB, and does just fine with existing release versions of iOS 4. I think Apple had this worked out long prior to iOS 4.2.

    • billybethel

      The 3GS doesn’t use nearly as much memory as the iPad.

      The larger multi-touch screen on the iPad uses up way more memory than any of the iPhones’ screens. In addition to this many of the apps(even the default ones) are more robust and are using more RAM to operate.

  • lrd

    I’m waiting for AirPlay.

    Really liked to see how this works with my AppleTV & Stereo System- liked to stream Pandora or maybe a cool screen saver while my music plays in the background that would dazzle visitors.

    Hope it’s available this Tuesday.

  • Guest

    Does anyone at apple understand what a TSR is? Only apple core apps have access to any semblance of multitasking. Everything is is Terminate and Stay Resident. Android is gonna eat their lunch. But i suspect apple will open up true multitasking just before that happens:)