You have Phone Speaker Switcher installed? That does that until you uncheck "open dashboard"

You might want to go tell Intel that their hyper-threading processors can't. More than one core - multitasking still doesn't exist?

:-) It does good sir.

If the human observer cannot see or feel the context switching then no matter how it happens, true multitasking actually does exist.

I'd also draw your attention to multiplexers, modems, and various other forms of data encoding techniques which definitely have many parallels.

maximus you dont make any sence now! on the top right you have the back button and on the top left the multitask menu button why do both buttons go to the multitask?

Well i dont really care. most of the system is made by people who dont have any idea of what they were doing and what the normal consumer wants.

You guys are so in love with your n900's that you get blind by these things. Things that the average user like me do see.

I have never seen a system that closes an sms conversation and does not go back to the main app but instead goes to the multitask screen. Especially NOT when there are no more open windows or conversations!

Im really sorry to say but you guys are so geek that you are blind to see whats really important in a system. This is also the reason only guys like you are buying this phone.

Dont get me wrong, its an awsome device! but these small things all together starting to get on my nerves. I just dont understand why people who built this aren't testing it and listen to the people that are using it. instead of built yet another crap phone (n8) and keep going on, going their own way. doesn't nokia see what is happening? Sorry guys i dont understand...

You right, hyper-thread and multi cores definitely are ready for that and giving us this possibility.
I'm not sure it's a case for ARM that widely are used in mobile world. We know about dual cores being already implemented but also we know. That from time that intel or AMD showed their first multi-thread approaches even these days so much software is not using this advantage. And the worst thing is when OS is not using it. Blocking access to this feature.

I'm not saying technologically is not there. My wild guess is WebOS, iPhone still using software emulation and managing internal processes/threads. And as a prove I was able to do so in flash. Just for cheating customers is good enough to say yes, it's multitasking, look! But we both knows is not the true multitasking.

In fact I will leave this feature like that because is useful from customer point of view. But I'm far away to advertising flaemo as truly multitasking OS.

No matter how geeky we are you absolutely right. Even the most crazy programmer living in matrix if doing stuff for others need to take others over himself under consideration. And for me that was always issue for linux geeks. Brilliant programmers, true geeks, not able to meet customer needs. But also over the last decade they doing progress, getting there closer and closer.

Regarding to N900 and Nokia politics there is bunch of threads about that, so is not worth to repeating this over and over again

Not on single cores and no, not on hyperthreading cores. HT emulates 2 cores, lettig the OS send parallel instructions, which are cached, optimized and executed with a granularity and knowledge that the OS doesn't have and even if it did, it had to execute multiple instructions per instruction.

However, as any low level programmer can tell you, multitasking does exist, two instructions can happen at once and it's a *ing problem.

As for N900, we all multitask because it's way, way easier. This way, if anything happens while I type, so be it. Also, notifications are easy. So it sound, notifications, etc. Otherwise, the core would have to juggle everything and Heaven help you if it cores.

My we are far from topic. Split a cab?

Cheers mate. That cleared it right up.
Disregard this whole thread now.