I love the multi task function and would use it like crazy if my n900 was not as buggy as anything. I have enough trouble receiving calls without anything open - many times phone rings with blank screen, goes straight to voicemail or just flashes up missed call without ever ringing. So it would mean I do not want to be able to use the device if I leave many things open.

Without the bugginess on my device I would probably always have about five things at least, open at anytime.

I think you should have an option in your voting to perhaps you HAVE to use multitasking because of the nature of the software. I rarely use multitasking by choice, but web browsing is one page per site so I am forced to have 2 or 3 on the go at any one time as it won't tab browse (and fennec and opera don't do flash). Conversations opens up but each "SMS" I send is another window. Only using SMS and web browsing means I can have 5 windows open. Yet I prefer to single app because the CPU is woefully inadequate and too many things drain CPU in the back ground.

I still argue it isn't multitasking when things die while stuff in the background runs, updates, indexes etc. And if everything (mediaplayer being the main one) crashes because you take a call. It isn't really multitasking.

Well I do the usual multi-tasking, music player running while web browsing with a term open, but more importantly it allows various services to remain running in the bg to handle messaging, etc.

Of all the applications, it's only with things like a media player or web-browser that the user would even notice that they have been running in the background (as they are loading/updating/playing music which the user will notice), so I think looking for concrete examples where multitasking actually affects the usability would be the best way to go.

One thing I would say is that the application manager and Maps apps are not really very pleasant to try to multitask with. The Maps app presents a splash screen with no way of escaping (other than triggering the camera app), which is pretty poor (but then the whole app is pretty poor).

Application manager is a CPU hog and should be reniced if switched into the background for whatever reason (e.g. phone call comes in, just pray this doesn't happen while HAM is trying to install something ).

I typically have 1-4 apps open at a time. Usually I have Conky running so that I can see what processes are running. In addition to that a typical use case is to have Mediaplayer playing music, web browser open, RSS widget checking feeds and email program open.

I like to close the programs that I am not using.

2-4 usually, my n900 was pretty crappy till I killed the useless yet cpu hogging daemon's that come with Maemo. They are a real brick wall to the multitasking capabilities.

From a marketing perspective you should push this feature, no other mobile OS comes close.

We rarely hear from Nokia around here, then out of the blue Nokia marketing starts a thread asking about multi-tasking. My butt clenched a little. My fear is that Nokia is questioning whether or not a computer OS is necessary on a phone; that maybe Apple and Google know something they don't. Well, they do and they don't. At the moment, they're both so concerned about user experience that they've been sacrificing almost everything to get it. Which makes some sense given the current CPU offerings.

But people are multi-taskers, and we would like our devices to multi-task with us. I didn't buy Nokia for the hardware, I bought Nokia for the native OS that it came with. And I will continue to buy my handhelds based almost solely on the native OS.

I do appreciate this thread though. As much as I'm a realist, I like to consider myself an optimistic realist. So, hopefully this thread will inspire Nokia to continue to lead the way in the only thing they seem to be leading these days: OS selection.

But if you think that both Google and Apple aren't gearing up for the multi-core future, then you're delusional. I give Nokia about a year and half to reinvent multi-core multi-tasking, or they will be toast.

I see a small but noticeable impact of this poll on graphical UI design decisions.
For the basic system task scheduling and multitasking/multiuser properties of linux/meego I really hope this poll is largely irrelevant.

So yes - it would be nice to have a more streamlined way to switch tasks (than dashboard only) which isn't solely relying on mouse/touchscreen/whatever - a clean hw-kbd_only approach like the alt-tab found on quite a number of major desktop managers. Generally a UI missing hotkeys for such an elementary task (or any other task) is defective by design. You SHOULD be able to use a system that has a broken touchscreen, as well as a system with broken hardware keyboard.
Maemo5 failed on this, and it needed matan's Modified Hildon Desktop [1] to fix it. Let's hope meego gets things sorted in that regard.

[1] http://my.arava.co.il/~matan/repo/Mo...n_Desktop.html

How many apps are open at max? 4 to 6 (Email, Feedingit, Tweego, Browser, Opera, Media Player)

How many apps are open all the time? 0.

I am stuck with 2G (AT&T) and it drains the battery a lot. Multitasking is great but whats the point if the battery gets discharged before I reach home.

I normally have about 3-5 open but when I don't use it I close everything , appart from email

Even though I typically leave a few apps open. But for instance when I'm browsing the internet I always use multiple browser instances to start loading all the pages I want to see. So I'm not using a lot of apps constantly, but when I'm "power-using" it I do ask the most out of my N900 when it comes to multi-tasking.