That's news to me. May I ask you to elaborate?
So far as I know, the term partial multitasking comes straight from pundits trying to explain what Apple's latest iOS is doing.
It seems to be leading to confusing and unnecessary adjectives, such as full multitasking or true multitasking.
Multitasking has plenty of flavors, Android's rooted in Linux, let's see what they have to say:
Multitasking definition by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)
FWIW, I have a rooted Evo running the stock 2.1 rom - meaning I can access the running process list via the ps command. It's here if you're interested:
View attachment 7718
The main difference with Linux and Android task management is simply when and why it decides to shuffle an application into the background.
It won't timeslice/multitask the browser and a photo album - because the Android display can't display two things at once, unlike Linux with a big desktop to toss lots of windows up.
However - suppose I start my media player, leave it running playing music and then start my Tricorder? The hardware supports that. The unix command top (show top running multitasked processes and their CPU percentage) then shows this on my phone:
User 49%, System 14%, IOW 0%, IRQ 0%
User 152 + Nice 1 + Sys 44 + Idle 111 + IOW 0 + IRQ 0 + SIRQ 0 = 308
.PID..CPU% S #THR VSS RSS PCY UID ..............Name
15293..36% S......10 187344K...27484K fg app_85 org.hermit.tricorder
...94..13% S......62 349728K...46028K fg system system_server
.1952...9% R......23 197992K...32440K bg app_84 org.iii.romulus.meridian
.4197...3% S......12 .41212K....5224K fg media. /system/bin/mediaserver
1
Notice that the Meridian player that I see is now in the background - but there're services running so that I still hear music while checking out the sun.
Here's a pretty good round-up of the Android revisions:
Android (operating system) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Here's one view of the two systems, Android and Apple:
davidquintana.com
Apple's definition of multitasking is unique.
Android's definition seems to follow known, standardized models.