I know the iPhone has been tested, tried, cracked, and tampered with in all possible ways, but I don’t often see anyone talking about a serious issue that stabbed my eyes practically from day one I’ve had the device: multitasking.

Now, these problems are reiterated by a find from TechCrunch, which points out certain flaws and limitations in the iPhone SDK, namely:

“Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. (p. 16)”

Now, as all of you iPhone users know, the iPhone supports multitasking - up to a certain degree. For example, if you open a page in your web browser, it’ll remember it even if you close Safari, open something else and then open Safari again. However, it does this by running all sorts of services in the background (that’s also why the iPhone is so blazingly fast compared to other cellphones.)

But iPhone applications can’t do everything in the background - sometimes the application just stops what it was doing when you quit. Furthermore, there’s no intelligent or easy to use interface to switch between (running) applications. Having to close one to open another isn’t really how I imagine multitasking. My Sony Ericsson P1i, for example, has a task manager for easy task switching.

According to the “iPhone Human Interface Guidelines” third party applications will be even more limited. They won’t even be allowed to run in the background. Perhaps I’m not the most common type of user, but I don’t look forward to silly games and Facebook-style timewasters from this SDK deal; I’m into really useful, robust apps that’ll continue to work, if needed, even if I switch to something else.

For me, this is a deal breaker. The iPhone is a very powerful gadget, but if you’re gonna limit it and the third party applications written for it left and right then it’s always going to remain what most people perceive it to be today: a fun, slick, trendy smartphone that can’t keep up with the “real” smartphones like Nokia N96 or Sony Ericsson P1i when it comes to real business.

[image source: www.techtreak.com]

Tony from Deep Jive Interests notices that Mahalo has been doing great according to Compete’s com figures, surpassing, for example, upcoming search engines Quintura and Hakia with ease.

There’s a lesson to be learned from it, and here it is: although Jason Calacanis has dived into the most competitive startup space, search, he’s done it well, and that’s why Mahalo is doing so great. Mahalo has been brimming with activity from the very beginning, and the actual search pages have been refined. The concept didn’t seem revolutionary at the time, but it was constantly improved. Compare the current search results, to how they looked at the beginning.

On the other end of the equation, I constantly see startups with weird and original ideas that will never amount to anything, simply because the actual implementation sucked. Sometimes improving is better than innovating.

Kristen from Mashable dug up a really cool website which specializes in t-shirts for venture capitalists. The site, called VCwear, is half-joke, half-real, but the actual t-shirts are really funny and that’s what counts. Check out the examples below.

Now, the prices are just a little too steep for me - 100 bucks per shirt - but then, again, I’m not a VC (yet), so there you go.

I often see comments, mostly coming from folks who live in the US, where EDGE is the standard and 3G - UMTS, HSDPA - is still very young, that you don’t need 3G if you have Wi-Fi.

This, I assure you, is very far from the truth. Even if you constantly move in an environment where free, open Wi-Fi is always present - which is rare - 3G just works better. UMTS signal penetrates natural obstacles better; it’s not sensitive to movoment as much as Wi-Fi, and you don’t have to worry about getting too far from an access point and losing connection. Furthermore, if your mobile device supports UMTS and it is enabled, and you have some kind of data plan set up with your mobile service provider, you don’t have to enter any data to access the Internet: no IPs, no gateways, no nothing. UMTS, as well as HSDPA, just works.

Of course, Wi-Fi has its own benefits; most importantly, the connection is usually way faster than UMTS or even HSDPA. However, most of the time you actually need Internet connection on your cell phone or other mobile device is when you don’t have a known Wi-Fi access point handy; you also usually need it to check your email or browse the net, not to download a lot of data. This is where 3G or even EDGE shines.

So, if we’re talking about the iPhone, or any other mobile device, and the Internet experience on it, don’t understimate 3G; in most cases, it’s a way better solution than Wi-Fi.

Everyone is happy about Sony Ericsson’s latest announcement, the wannabe iPhone killer XPERIA X1. And, while I like to see an interesting new phone (even though it’s built on the Windows Mobile platform, which - and I’m speaking from experience here - is an awful platform compared to Symbian, and will probably fare even worse compared to iPhone and its upcoming SDK as well as Android), I’m not particularly happy about it.

That’s because I own Sony Ericsson P1i, a Symbian UIQ3 phone. Since Sony Ericsson is basically the only significant backer of this platform (Nokia uses Symbian S60 or S80 for their smartphones), and they’re obviously switching to Windows Mobile since XPERIA X1 is only the first in a series of smartphones, I reckon that the UIQ3 platform is doomed to die a lonely death. Not that good for owners of UIQ2 or UIQ3 based phones, is it?

Well, perhaps it’s for the best. I’m a gadget fanatic and I do change them often; I’m buying an iPhone right now and will probably own an Android-based phone in a year’s time anyway. My P1i has served me well; it will probably continue to do so for another year or so.

However, this is one of those cases where you feel cheated. You buy a high-end smartphone, and expect good support and a lot of applications to play with, and you get shafted. From this perspective, Android’s openness and support from many strong backers sound really good, and I have more and more reasons to believe that it’s going to be the mobile platform of the future.

Yes, the truth has finally been exposed; I’ve been running this whole blogging scheme just to get on Valleywag, and now my life finally has a purpose. Well, sort of; I didn’t really get on Valleywag, I just happened to be next to that handsome rascal, Pete “The Heartbreaker” Cashmore, on a Mashable screenshot. But still; it’s there, and I expect big movie studios and hot female tech reporters (Natali del Conte, I’m looking at you) to come woo me any second now.

And here’s the proof (naughty bits blurred for the safety of our youngest readers):

Seriously though, Valleywag puts fun into this business. May they live long and prosper.

You know all about it by now, and if you don’t, you can get the scoop just about anywhere. Yes, Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo at a mind boggling 44.6 billion dollar valuation.

What I find strange about Microsoft’s move is the fact that it’s one sided. The deal is not officially closed yet; in fact, Yahoo hasn’t said yes to Microsoft; hell, they haven’t even signed the prenup yet. Given the fact that rumors about Microsoft buying Yahoo have been floating around for literary years (and the last time we heard it the valuation was 50 billion dollars,) one would expect that Microsoft would wait until the deal is really set in stone and then go public with it in a joint statement with Yahoo.

Instead, they go with a one sided proposal; dead serious and very accurate as far as numbers go, but still one sided. Is it a sign of desperation? After all, Google has been dominating a very, very large chunk of the online services business for a long time - especially advertising, where the real money lies. Or is it the fine print in an already signed deal with Yahoo that says that Microsoft has to come out of the closet first?

In any case, it would be very interesting (although unlikely) if Yahoo declined the offer; it’d be like to wounded soldiers with a feud, refusing to help each other and marching, both alone, towards an unhappy ending.

Damn, I knew this day would come. Someone will actually try to organize Twitter into something coherent. It is, of course, complete and absolute folly, since the overwhelming majority of the stuff said on Twitter is completely useless - but hey, you can’t blame ‘em for trying.

TC says “The business of tracking the online conversation just a got shot in the arm with the tech equivalent of crack cocaine.” I agree wholeheartedly, although I wouldn’t say it’s crack - it’s LSD.

There’s a new site in town, dedicated to covering Croatian web projects and startups: Cromotion.net. The site is written in the English language.

Croatia is a small country, and therefore don’t expect too much news from this neck of the woods (also bear in mind that the concept of startup is somewhat stretched to accommodate for smaller projects), but whenever something new does appear on the radar, it’ll be there. The site is maintained by Berislav Lopac, the same guy responsible for organizing the first Croatian conference on startups, WebStart, which I was happy to be a part of last year. This year, WebStart will be held on May 8-9, and some interesting speakers are already scheduled to attend.

When I started FranticIndustries in 2006, the words “web 2.0″ and “startup” were virtually unknown here in Croatia. I’m glad to see the situation has changed for the better; hopefully, we’ll see some world class projects coming from these parts very soon.

Invite-beta, that is; which means that you don’t have to be invited to use the service, you can try it whenever you like. For those uninitiated, Pownce can most easily be described as a polished version of Twitter; some of its features actually make it a much better version of Twitter in my eyes, read some of my thoughts here and here.

Check out my Pownce profile here.

GlobalPandora is yet another try to bring Pandora back to users outside of the US. When Pandora was shut down for everyone outside of US and UK (it has since closed its doors in UK, too), I listed several proxy-related methods to access the service regardless of where you live, but most of them were short lived.

GlobalPandora gives out very little info about who’s behind the project, but so far, it works: you can even log in with your Pandora credentials. I hope the project won’t get shut down, but given how fast the folks at Pandora were banning various proxy IPs, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

[via TechCrunch UK]

Ewedrive, a simple online storage solution, has sent its users a notification saying that the service will close down, and current users will have a grace period to move their data from the service.

The developers will now focus on their other service, DesktopOnDemand, which is a WebOS-style desktop on the go that also integrates much of Ewedrive’s functionality.

Ewedrive has been featured here at FranticIndustries and has later become a sponsor of the site; this proves that a nice simple idea sometimes isn’t enough to sustain a business, especially if there’s loads of competition out there.