Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan recently wrote about many of the problems he sees in Apple’s new iPhone OS 4. Most of them are the primary new features, like the new task manager. He finds it just as easy to jump back to the home screen with a single press of the home button than to have to double press it and flick through just one row of application icons. The row of active tasks also seems to get very long unless you specifically tap-n-hold on each icon to close the program in order to remove it from the task list.

What’s funny is that back on April 8th at the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement event, Steve Jobs actually said, “It’s like we said on the iPad: if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it. Users shouldn’t have to ever, ever, EVER think about that stuff.” Yet this was just after he announced and showed off a task manager for iPhone OS 4.0 that appears at the bottom of the screen right in front of your face. So obviously users do have to think about that stuff. Or is Steve Jobs’ definition of a task manager something other than an interface for seeing, switching between, and ending active tasks at the user’s discretion?