Lots of people have been quick to point out that Apple’s new iPad (a name which could have been better chosen) will lack multitasking support – just like the iPhone. I don’t think that this is going to be a problem.
Firstly, what kinds of activities were Apple showing off in the keynote? Let’s see:
- Reading a book
- Watching a film
- Answering/Writing email
- Browsing the web
- Playing a video game
- Listening to music
With the exception of the last item, I don’t think I’d want to combine any of those two tasks, especially on the same device. Who watches a movie while they’re trying to read a book? Even if I do want to switch between two such activities – Look up the name of an actor in the movie I’m watching for example – I’d have to pause/save/bookmark my movie/game/page in order to do so. Even if I could keep my movie playing while I did a search on the web, I wouldn’t want to: I’d miss some of the action!
Music is an exception that should be addressed, and indeed already has. Like the iPhone, you can play music ‘in the background’ while you do other things. Problem solved! The same can be said for services that need notification; Mail, Twitter, etc. Can all notify you that a message has arrived without interrupting the current task.
The iPad is definitely not for everyone, but anyone who is on the fence shouldn’t be too concerned by the lack of multi-tasking. When you’re buried in your favourite book or watching the climactic scene of a movie you won’t care.
I still think it’s a pretty big deal. If I’m answering an email and want to look something up, I can’t. The “listening to music” one is huge, I’m hoping they’ve got some kind of functionality for that one at the very least.
yeah, I can handle not having multitasking on the iPhone, where it’s a mild annoyance that I can brush aside as a hardware limitation, but there’s no excuse for the lack of it on the iPad.
As a prolific twitterer and all around net user, I thrive off information supply. I WOULD want to quickly pull up twitter, or my e-mail in the middle of something else, and the fact that I have to close a program to open another annoys me on the iPhone. The lack of it on the iPad would almost be a deal-breaker if I were in the market to purchase one.
I agree with Matt about Twitter; that’s a big one for sure. I don’t want a push notification for every tweet, I want to be able to flip over to twitter and flip back very easily.
I wonder if they couldn’t just fix this in a firmware update, though? The iPhone was far from perfect when it was released too.