Galaxy S II: The Missing Manual

Apps and Multitasking

THE GALAXY S II is great at multitasking—running more than one app at a time. For example, you 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 know that Android is multitasking, though, because unlike in an operating system like Windows or Mac OS x, you can’t see all running apps simultaneously or switch between them through such simple means as using Windows’Alt-Tab keystroke. Instead, you tap the app’s icon.

When you’re in an app and want to do something else on the Galaxy S II, you typically press the Home key. From there, you can tap to run an app such as the web browser, or open the Application Tray to run more apps. When you do that, though, 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 the Galaxy S II will notice that you haven’t used it in a while and close it down. You won’t even notice that the Galaxy S II has closed it.

Note

You can find apps called task killers that claim to speed up your Galaxy S II by automatically closing apps when they’re no longer needed, or by letting you manually close those apps. However, the era of task killers is drawing to a close, now that the Galaxy S II has built-in features that do the same thing (Using the Task Manager for Managing Apps).

There is a way to make sure that you close an app ...