Galaxy Tab: The Missing Manual

Apps and Multitasking

Your Galaxy Tab is great at multitasking—running more than one app at a time. Your Tab can browse the Web while you listen to music, receive email, and have Facebook updates delivered to you, all without breaking a sweat.

You usually don’t notice that Android is multitasking, though, because unlike in Windows or Mac OS X, you can’t resize app windows and see the underlying desktop while you’re using an app. But you have a simple way of seeing many of the apps that you’re currently running, or apps that you’ve been running recently: Tap the Recent Apps button at the bottom of the screen and a list with big thumbnails of all of the apps you’ve recently run pops up. Tap any item to switch to it.

Note

The apps you see aren’t necessarily running right now. The apps you’ve most recently quit show up, too.

When you switch between the app you’re running and another app, that first app is still running in the background. If it’s a music-playing app or a radio app, it keeps playing until you close it. With many other apps, though, at some point Android notices that you haven’t used it in a while and closes it down. You won’t even notice that your Galaxy Tab has closed it.

To make sure that you close an app when you switch away from it, try this: Press the Menu key at the upper right of your screen and see if there’s a choice for closing the app. Not all apps offer this choice (or even a Menu key), but that’s OK; Android closes the app when it’s no longer needed.

Tip

You can find apps called task killers that claim to speed up Android by automatically closing apps when they’re no longer needed, or by letting you manually close those apps. Most everyone agrees that these apps are superfluous—the Android operating system does an excellent job of closing apps when they’re no longer needed. In fact, many task killers don’t even run with Honeycomb.