[Vibrant General] lmlloyd:
Where does he say that anywhere in that quote? You quote the whole article, I read the whole article, yet at no point do I even see him mention task killers, much less "stating that using a task killer will almost guarantee a slower experience on the phone." He is talking about why they chose not to have a close or quit button in the applications, and why they chose a multi-tasking environment. At no point does he seem to mention third party task managers at all.

No one is arguing the fact that a multi-threaded multitasking environment is better that a task-swapping or single-task environment. All that is being discussed is whether there is a place for user input in the task management process. I don't see a single word in that article explaining why I am better off living with a slow phone, because Samsung and T-Mobile decided my phone should occasionally auto-launch every single one of the bundled applications (90% of which I have never even opened once), with no user input. I don't see anything in there that explains why I should wait around for Android to realize that it can stop running Slacker, because I have never even put in login information, rather than me getting back the speed of my phone by just telling it I don't need it open.

Is it really that hard to understand that Google could have designed a good task management system, that is still something short of absolutely perfect? Yes, they are smart guys at Google, and yes, they have done a good job with Android, and yes, our phones have a lot of memory and processor power, but guess what, the human brain still has a lot more ability to analyze situations on the fly than any software stack or phone. No matter how smart their algorithms are, they still seem to miss the fact that 100% of my calls go through Google Voice, and my voicemail redirects to Google Voice, so why do I need Visual Voicemail to keep launching itself?

It isn't a matter, as some of you seem to keep childishly casting it, of Google saying you don't need one, therefore anyone saying you do thinks they know more than Google. It is, apparently, a matter of you misreading what Google said in the first place. It really isn't that different than a desktop OS. Yes, if you open your task manager and just start randomly killing off processes, you are going to hose your system. That doesn't mean that a skilled user can't get a valuable insight into system performance, and perhaps even improve it, by having access to that information, and the ability to manually interact with it. That doesn't mean that there aren't going to be times where a user is going to have to manually kill a process or service. As smart as the guys at Google are, and as much usage information as they might collect, they are still not omniscient, and cannot predict every possible configuration, and every possible problem.

Good lord, why am I having to write this as though it the intended audience was 8th graders? If you understand so little about multitasking environments, and process management, that you can't understand the difference between what he is saying in this article, and what you are claiming he is saying, then why do you have a vocal opinion on the place user input has in the task management process to begin with? I really don't get this whole "I don't really understand this stuff, but I heard it was bad, so I'm going to authoritatively tell everyone not to do it." If you don't really understand how it works, then by all means don't run a task manager program, but stop pretending you know what you are talking about, and telling other people what to do.