Most of the time 3-6 windows open (but occasionally over 9).
Most of these are usually browser windows, but I tend to close them as "rogue" javascript or flash *kills* the battery life.
GPodder remains open almost permanently as listening to podcasts is one of the primary uses my N900 gets

On the desktop, Diary and Foreca Weather Widgets, and on another homescreen the RSS widget.
Online for Skype, GTalk & Ovi chat most of the day (although this means I now travel everywhere with a charger since losing my extra battery),
Some sort of battery "hot-swap" solution would be most welcome (i.e. allow the main battry to be swapped out without having to power-down)

The *MOST* useful thing is the CPU meter that runs in the Battery & reception indicator area.
This shows me when some web page is causing 100% CPU so to be patient. It nearly always is a web page with lots of javascript.

Most of the time I have 6 to 9 windows open, right now I have 7 SMS windows, FBReader, BatteryGraph, media player, calendar and xterminal running.

Kim

I usually have between 1 and 3 apps. I'd use more occasionally, but the N900 is a bit memory-starved and gets painfully slow if I open too many of them, so I got into the habit of closing one of the three running apps before opening a new one.

I guess the apps I use are more memory hungry than average (FBReader, xterm with vim editing a large'ish text file, and especially the web browser).

The above is typical of what I have open, but I don't think of FBReader or xterm with vim (also what I often use) as multitasking. I wouldn't care if they swapped to disk, as long as they were ready when I got back to them.

This is what confuses me about this whole topic. Much of the stuff mentioned in the context of multitasking isn't doing anything when it's not in the active window.

I normally use the inbuilt IM app signed in to facebook and skype and the Pidgin to MSN and Yahoo. On top, web pages which I open as many as I need without closing another reaching 6+ pages or with other apps sometimes as the maximum. To add, shortcutd has made the experience even better and to finish it up, I think the dashboard with the view of the open apps is the best thing that happened to the mobile phone.

Much of the N900's problem with multitasking comes up when a RAM intensive program starts getting swapped out. Normally, this isn't an issue but since accesses to the eMMC are extremely CPU intensive (and all that IO happens in the kernel) we get terrible amounts of unresponsiveness. The browser is easily the greatest culprit of this problem, and I have hit it many times.

More RAM would improve multitasking significantly, as would being able to DMA from eMMCs (which I don't know if it's possible.) This is also why messing with swappiness can improve responsiveness.

usual tasks..........

media player.
web browser...4 to 5 windows on average
IM 4 windows
conky
contacts
calender
e-mail
witter
mastory

I typically have 2-5 windows open, mainly because I find that some of them effect "standby"(screen off, nothing happening) battery life.
If I'm doing a bunch of stuff I can easily have many more(usually browser windows), but I tend to close most at the end of my active session.

If I had A, more ram and B, better "active-suspend" support so I don't lose battery life, I'd have a lot more open at a time.

Of course, having a dual-core processor would help too; with 4+ browser windows -loading- at a time it gets kind of laggy, even OC'd to 950mhz.

If there is -one- thing I like about the N900's multitasking its the ctrl+backspace to show all windows. That one feature makes multitasking -so- much easier - though it does require the keyboard to be open.
For a new device, I'd like to see at least one multi-function button on the top or side that would let me do that without opening the keyboard, which would make it easier to do when holding it in portrait mode.

-Rob

I don't know what exactly you mean by '"active-suspend" support', but the N900 is really quite frugal with power when idle, with no user intervention required -- as soon as the CPU runs out of stuff to run, it drops to the equivalent of a laptop's suspend-to-ram, so there's not much use for any sort of manual suspend.

The trouble users have with low battery life stems mostly from programs that are actually using the processor (which of course does use power) while the screen is off, typically fetching updates or such, and the only "cure" is to stop them from running, which is IMO highly undesirrable, as it creates a traffic jam on wakeup, as the RSS reader, IM client, app manager, etc. all wind up going online and updating at once, rendering the system somewhat unresponsive when the very reason you woke it up was probably to do something now.

The other place you can save power in a suspend-like mode is to take one or more radios offline, eliminating the WLAN, bluetooth, and/or cell radio power draw, and also (depending if you leave any network links active) stopping apps from trying to update. This has been available under-the-hood (some tweaking required to activate instead of screen-lock) in the N800 and N810, and may still be there for the n900, but I never liked it -- you wind up waiting for it to reconnect, and then the aforementioned traffic jam bogs the CPU down again, then you get to do whatever you unlocked the screen to do.

IMO it's better to simply not use apps that grind unnecessarily when you're not using them, and/or to have options in the app that legitimately need processing (e.g. mapping software) to curtail/reduce activities when the screen is off.

Oddly, the 770, N800, and N810 all had just such a button on the front face, to the left side of the display -- I guess someone decided that bit of functionality wasn't as important as shaving a couple millimeters off the overall size.

You are keeping Angry Birds open at all times, really? Wow!