There’s an interesting editorial on the iPad’s need to have both multitasking and multiple user setup. While lacking both of these features is not necessarily a deal breaker, it could be a bit of an inconvenience for those who intend to use the iPad as a laptop replacement. While we won’t exactly know how well the iPad will deal with the iWork productivity apps, the article points out a possible shortcoming without multitasking:

Actually, multitasking is essential to one of the major features that Apple has been touting on the iPad: iWork. Imagine trying to make a Keynote presentation without being able to access other files or being able to check on the Internet for data, citations or other information. Sure, there is reported to be a shared folder on the iPad, which all applications will be able to access. So you can stick your text files, graphics, videos and music files there if you already know you want to use them for a presentation, Pages document, or Numbers spreadsheet. But if you’re like most people, you don’t plan out every step of your documents ahead of time; you build them up as you go along. If you have to quit, say, Keynote every time you need to check something on the web or copy some data from a Numbers spreadsheet, you’ll be spending a lot of time switching apps and not much time producing.

The key for the iPad is how quickly one will be able to jump from one app to the next.  If it takes a second or two to launch an app, then multitasking may not be an issue but if you have to wait five to ten seconds, then it can get pretty annoying.  At this point, we don’t know for sure but hopefully issues will be addressed once the iPad comes out in full swing.

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