On the other hand, I've never seen an app on Android that sucked down battery life, and if it did, I'd uninstall it just like any other buggy app. I've never bought into the whole "background services drain battery life" line that Apple popularized.
Android also has the lovely screen showing which apps are burning the battery. In my experience, an _overwhelming_ fraction of power use is by the screen and the radio. (And by games running in the foreground, but that's to be expected.)
Yes, that's a red herring.
But there is indeed a real problem with the "real" multitasking that android implements: Responsiveness. This is one area that they absolutely need to work on urgently.
On the iPhone everything is near instant, or if you have to wait then there is clear indication that the phone is doing something.
On Android we get the familiar (but unwelcome) choppyness that we know from Desktop Operating Systems. Button presses will not always be recognized immediately (or sometimes not at all). Page transitions are not always smooth, often they are choppy or do outright freeze in the middle. It is very often not obvious that you have to wait; i.e. a button press will cause the UI to freeze momentarily but without giving you any feedback that your press was actually registered.
And ofcourse the unpredictable delays when opening or switching apps. A multi-second delay before opening the phonebook or dialer is simply unacceptable for a phone.
This description actually makes it sound worse than it is. Despite these problems I'm quite happy with my Samsung Galaxy overall. But they need to work on this stuff if they want the perception of android as "slow" and "choppy" to change. Because that's the first thing you notice when playing around with an android device in the store.
Tell that to my 3G with iOS4. It'd be more appropriate to say "nothing is near instant."
Perhaps I should just have left the reference out altogether. Imho it's a serious problem that needs to be addressed regardless of the state on other platforms.