alasta:

CdTDroiD:

uglyb0b: My thoughts exactly. Every person I have shown this to had no idea that the phone was doing it or how to fix it. It doesn't make sense coming from Apple.

Really good point there, with the "new" multitasking it is totally up to the user to take care of it, Android and WP7 will end tasks when needed (usually) at the right times 

Based on what I've heard previously and what others have suggested here I don't think that this is strictly correct. It's my understanding that iOS is supposed to withdraw system resources from any app that doesn't need to perform any further actions, hence effectively shutting the app down even though it will still appear in the 'double-tap' menu. So, in theory the multitasking environment shouldn't require any user intervention but in practice this doesn't actually seem to be the case, and I wonder if it's because of poorly written third party apps unnecessarily demanding system resources when they're idle.

It would be interesting if someone with a technical background in iOS could clarify this.