You could be forgiven for passing over the extra RAM in Palm’s recently announced Pre Plus as pretty dry news, but apparently a few extra megabytes here and there can make a pretty huge real-world difference. More specifically, the Verizon-bound Palm Pre Plus can run 50 applications simultaneously.
Dieter Bohn at PreCentral.net put both phones head to head for a multitasking battle royale, and the Plus slaughtered its predecessor.
While the original 256MB Pre could run up to 13 applications simultaneously via the card-based WebOS operating system – still a feat that makes the unitasking iPhone look feeble – the 512MB version can apparently handle 50 apps. Perhaps we should even say “at least” 50 apps, since Dieter reached the end of his patience with opening apps before the phone reached the end of its memory.
Does anyone actually need to run 50 apps? Unless you’re trying to listen to Pandora while playing Need for Speed Underground while looking up cheat codes and intermittently chatting it up on Gchat – plus a whole lot more – the answer is no. Even if you did, the scrolling alone to make it through 50 apps clearly becomes ridiculous. But the fact that we’re even paying attention to a phone’s degree of multitasking capability means we may have advanced past the point where simply being able to do it at all becomes a selling point (we’re looking at you, Droid).
Are dual-core mobile processors on the way? We won’t hold our breath, but with dual-core Intel Atom processor for netbooks already here, a man can dream.
