Welcome to Round Table, which is in fact not a table at all. Round Table is a continuing series on PreCentral where we pose a question to the staff and they provide their thoughts and insights. The question could be something simple like “what’s your favorite webOS app?” or something a bit more complicated, like “what was Palm’s biggest mistake in getting here today?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about our favorite recipe for pumpkin pie, you never know.

Today, however, we're taking a critical look at our devices and webOS and asking, “If there was one thing you could improve about webOS, what would it be, and why?”

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With all of the attention on Windows Phone 7 Series' lack of true multitasking, we wanted to point out that figuring out multitasking on webOS is still a work in progress.

Being able to do background processing is one thing the webOS is know for. So when 1.4 changed how background processes worked, developers took notice.  Absent from the list of 1.4 changes was an alteration that widely affected applications that work in the background.

Essentially, before 1.4, background applications wouldn't close unless the developer specified them to. Makes sense, however some reports suggest the built-in javascript garbage collector wouldn't be called on background applications, causing memory leaks, and potentially leading the "too many cards" error.

Developers were the first to notice this changed with webOS 1.4. Now, after 15 seconds, applications without an active stage are automatically closed. Naturally this caused a bit of frustration; getting an active GPS location alone can take 30+ seconds, so how could a background applications get everything done in 15 seconds?

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