Originally Posted by IvanIV:
“I have a game on my 2G that will drain a battery in 0.5-1 hour, but I still like to play it. Why the F could not we once have a choice. Why the multitasking cannot be optional, something a user could configure. And if it was too demanding on the battery it could be turned off. This way somebody once again already decided what's best for me.”
I believe the reason multi-tasking will not be supported on the 2nd gen iTouch is because it only has 128MB of RAM, which is barely enough to handle some of the larger apps it currently runs (in practice in the best case scenario after resetting the device and running something to release as much memory as possible, there is a maximum of only about 65MB of that 128MB free). Throw in multi-tasking with additional background apps using up RAM and you'll run into serious problems.
The 3rd gen iTouch has 256MB of RAM making it far more capable of handling having background apps using up memory, as it has a full extra 128MB available for them (so whereas the 2nd gen might have a max of 65MB available for running apps, the 3rd gen can easily have well in excess of 150MB for them).
The reason multi-taking isn't supported on the 2nd gen iTouch is not because of the processor power or battery-life, but because it would soon run out of memory and apps would frequently crash.