iPad 1 - Multitasking

Don't get me wrong: I'm a power user. I like gobs of RAM, lots of HD space, multi-core processors and fast networking. I like tuning my machine to run full tilt and then bringing it to its knees with the applications I run on a regular basis. Mixing down music I've recorded, ripping a DVD so I don't have to carry the disk on the plane, various and sundry development environments, virtual machines and terminals and browsers galore. I love forcing my machine to do my bidding.

But all this talk about the iPad failing because of missing multitasking is, well, just silly. The best example people can come up with is that you can't browse the web while listening to Pandora. But of course, you can browse the web while listening to music, since the iPad, effectively a big, 3G-enabled iPod Touch, puts music playback at the system level. Pandora may be great and everything, but I'd hardly call that a deal killer.

The iPad does indeed do multi-tasking. System level activity runs right alongside the apps that users install from the App Store. It just doesn't do application-level multitasking, and while that's something that I like to be able to do on my desktop, I'm not sure that it's such a big problem on a tablet-type device.

One of the great things about the iPhone Apps is that they are all required to shut down within five seconds if you hit the home key. Many--maybe most?--take that five seconds to save state so that when you come back in, you can continue what you were doing. And like it or not, the majority of the time, that's what most users are doing when they have multiple apps running on a desktop/laptop computer at the same time. They aren't necessarily interested in the background application doing significant processing while they interact with a foreground application. Instead, they leave multiple programs running so that they can move back and forth as they need to without re-establishing state. When you move from Outlook to Excel to Word, copying and pasting data, the programs you push to the background aren't doing anything special except taking up RAM and processor time while they are waiting for you to call on them again.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. If you're doing complex graphics rendering, or video encoding, or compiling code, you definitely want multitasking to allow you to continue to use your computer while work is being done in the background. For most cases like this, I'd simply say that the iPad is the wrong tool for the job. But for email, web browsing, some types of content creation and media consumption, it just may not be so important. Being able to move between apps which have saved their states upon exit may indeed be good enough.

I would be interested in seeing an OS feature which would allow you to easily switch with a gesture between the last three (or so) applications which have been run. If you're moving data from one program to another (i.e. the iWork suite) it might be nice to be able to jump from one to another without going "home", then going into another application, then back again. Dollars to donuts, if they had that feature, most people wouldn't know the difference between the fast switching and actual multitasking.

Again, don't get me wrong: I'm not about to try to install the iPhone/iPad OS on my desktops. But for these simple mobile devices, it's not a huge loss in my book. In fact, when balanced against the additional resources that would be required, and the effect multitasking could have on performance and battery life, I'm thinking that this is the right decision.