The lack of background apps on the iPhone is, we can only assume, a consequence of Apple's goal to get the most battery life as they possibly can out of the thing. Presumably, they'll evolve the thing to either support it, or have enough hooks that you don't desperately need it.
Even if Apple allow full background apps in the future (not likely I think unless on a future revision of the hardware), I think the fact that they weren't allowed to start with has made the third party apps better than they would have been otherwise.
The lack of backgrounding means that third party apps have to assume the app will be quit at any moment. This means that 99.9% of them work brilliantly with respect to persisting exactly what the user was doing when they quit.
If the apps were backgrounded all the time, the vast majority of third party developers wouldn't bother with niceties like that. Us developers are typically lazy by default...
I suspect that the driver behind no background apps is as much memory as battery life. The iPhone clearly needs more memory. It has a desktop OS slimmed down to fit on a phone and because of that probably needs more memory than things like Windows Mobile. If Apple did what MSFT and leave all apps running in the background then the iPhone would run out of memory very quickly.
There are three apps where I really wish there was backgrounding:
- NetNewsWire my RSS reader (that gets it RSS feed information from the developers website)
- Chess With Friends (play chess against random humans around the world)
- GPS track logging
The first two can be addressed without true backgrounding, Apple's proposed notification system should work well for them. The GPS track logging is more of an issue...
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