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Originally Posted by Jon Westfall
I bet they'll find out next that some people want to run more than one program at once...
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Hate to break this to you (actually, I don't) but Palms CAN multitask, and I'm getting really, really tired of seeing this old myth trotted out.
The difference is that we're all familiar with pre-emptive multitasking, like Windows and OS X. Garnet supports co-operative multitasking, like Windows 3.1 or Mac OS 9. The biggest difference is that with co-operative multitasking, applications have to be written to support it, otherwise they don't multitask. In a pre-emptive setup, applications don't have to implicitly support multitasking; it's handled by the OS.
For example, in Garnet it's quite possible to leave your IM program running in the background while you do other things, but the IM program has to be written to support that (VeriChat does exactly this). Same for background email fetching (supported by SnapperMail, VersaMail and Chatter), maintaining network connections (handled by Garnet itself) and other cases where multitasking is useful enough to warrant writing the code to support it. Leaving a word processor running in the background is just a waste of memory on a handheld.