Battery life. It is the entire reason for Apple providing devs with multitasking services and fast app switching in their API rather than just letting every app continue running in the background. The fast app switching part just requires a recompile - background audio and network completion tasks require special coding, but it is no more difficult than those codes would be otherwise - just a different approach. I don't expect it will take long for most apps to get updated, and of course the flood of apps coming every day will support it. The Android approach requires app developers to understand the tradeoffs and design their apps in such a way that they don't continue chewing up massive resources while backgrounded (i.e. killing the battery), because they are not prevented from doing so by the API. Many app developers will not do a good job of that.

If the phone has signal issues in real world use your point is valid. I haven't seen real world issues with mine yet - but we shall see. I suspect if this is really a problem Apple will do something about it - they're certainly profitable enough to do a replacement program. It would certainly be less expensive than the fallout of a yearlong debacle with their primary product. It is telling that in this thread someone marked my prior comment as a troll (really??) Seems to me there is plenty in this stream that is quite a bit more inflammatory than that. Slashdot certainly has a 'point of view' ..

I have one - haven't seen any problem in real-world use although I can make a bar disappear by covering the bottom of the phone. Pandora continues to stream just fine. I'm guessing many phone manufacturers hide the issue by making the signal strength indicator update more slowly or in a non-linear fashion or something... Non-issue really, but the rabid Android contingent needs something to make them feel better about the 6 hour battery life of the EVO. Let's be real - ALL smartphones have some issue or another that can be called out. The new iPhone is a pretty damn great piece of kit regardless.

Ideological purity rarely works in the real world. If you take it too far you wind up with Bush as President... Without Apple, the GUI would have remained hidden away in the PARC labs until who knows? Apple took those rough ideas and polished them to a wonderful degree, then brought them to the world. Similarly the iPhone touch UI Apple has commercialized is fantastic. Who really believes open software would produce new classes of products such as those? I am very happy to pay money to innovators who bring me things I otherwise could never have. Open and commercial software are complimentary. I think patent law should be addressed so that open software products can come in and commoditize things once they have matured, but lots of real innovation happens in the commercial space.