I've been in this conversation before, and you're right: it's fun to debate!
Personally, I see multi-tasking as a kludge to make up for sloppy programming (oooooh....I got a GOOD reaction from a PPC-zealot on that remark)! Take your example of Real Player: if it would properly return in EXACTLY the same state you left it, you would see NO difference between between task-switching versus multi-tasking. But, many developers don't put in the extra effort to do it right, and Palm suffers for it.
With multi-tasking, the program always runs, so the developer can be lazy about such things. However, this is a waste of processor power. I rather like how I can bounce between 4 different apps on the Tungsten C without experiencing a slow-down within each app. Things start getting a little sluggish on the PPC if you don't manage your tasks properly.
Solution? Not sure on that one. I suppose Palmsource could try to improve the developer tools so that "state-saving" is easy to implement, but developer-laziness can always overcome that.
For me, I use Zlauncher with QuickLaunch so that my recently-used apps are quickly available (like a taskbar), and then select applications that state-save properly. It's the best of all worlds, if you can find the good apps.
But, I'm sure the developers prefer the PPC Multi-tasking for ease of development.
- Jim
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