Those with an iPhone know that one of it’s greatest strengths is also one of it’s greatest weaknesses. I’m talking about the lack of multi-tasking. How is that a strength you ask? Well it’s down to Apple being single-minded and preventing all but only a few select apps from running in the background that the iPhone is still one of the fastest and most responsive phone experiences you can get, despite being knocked off the top spot by the likes of the Nexus One with it’s 1GHz snapdragon processor. It’s rumoured that Apple will update the iPhone 3G/3GS with some sort of multi-tasking at Wednesday’s event in San Francisco, but whether Apple enables true multi-tasking that fits the bill is yet to be seen. Besides, why wait when you can have true background-multitasking right now?

So, what if you want to run something in the background, something Apple doesn’t deem fit to take up valuable RAM? Well if you’re reading this you’re probably pretty au fait with the whole jailbreak for iPhone and iPod touch. If not check out our previous coverage. Once you’ve got your iDevice released from the vice grip of Apple’s code signing, load up Cydia and download yourself Backgrounder. This little app essentially allows non-Apple apps to run in the background whilst you go about your business, it’s the linchpin to all the multi-tasking you could wish for on the iPhone. Next, you’ve got a choice of a few task managers but my money is on ProSwitcher.

This beautiful little free app integrates so well with the iPhone OS you’d think it was an Apple implementation and emulates the ‘Cards’ system that WebOS uses for task switching. There are quite a few triggers, but my personal favourite is the double tap to the status bar. A quick double tap and the app your currently in zooms out allowing you to swipe left and right to switch applications with a simple tap. If you want to close the current application or another one all you have to do is either tap the little ‘X’ at the top of the card or swipe the card up and out. Simple, effective and incredibly slick.

On the iPhone 3G, memory is limited but as long as you don’t take the piss you won’t have too much trouble. Of course the fewer applications you have running at one time the slower your device is likely to respond. If you boot up an app that needs more RAM than what’s free and available, then the OS asks certain apps to close. On the 3GS, you’ve got more RAM to play with and so you can run many more applications at once without impacting on responsiveness. On the battery front, of course running lots of apps over an extended period of time will drain your battery faster than normal, but I’ve found that general usage with backgrounder and ProSwitcher hasn’t made any difference to the battery life of my iPhone. In fact if anything have precise control over what’s running, especially Safari and switching between mail and messaging apps faster, has increased the amount of time I can get out of a full charge.

So if you’ve ever wanted to run an app in the background on your iPhone, you’ve got it jailbroken and you can’t wait/don’t like the Apple implementation, then you simply must try out Backgrounder + ProSwitcher. After running it for a month or so now I can say there’s very little to worry about stability wise and if you simple don’t like it, Cydia can remove it all just fine.

Both Backgrounder and ProSwitcher can be found in the Cydia app store or using your preferred installer.