The importance of multitasking

Multitasking is, odd as it seems, one of the largest debates in the tech industry in 2010.  Apple’s new iPad, along with the iPhone and iPod Touch, do not support multitasking except for some select bundled apps.  On a phone, this is much less of a limitation, but with the iPad being considered as a computer/laptop/netbook replacement, multitasking is much more of a concern.

Multitasking has been dismissed as a power-user feature that regular consumers would seldom need, but consider my situation today.  I’m typing up homework (in Word 2010) from my college website (in Chrome).  To do my homework, I’m referring to my textbook ebook (a PDF file open in Adobe Reader) and have needed to look up references online (again, in Chrome).  I’ve also got Media Player running in the background shuffling Classical music.  Then, to write this post, I fired up Windows Live Writer while everything else was still running.  By anyone’s definition, this is multitasking, but is it such an odd scenario?  Wouldn’t this be something many students would need to do on a daily basis?

I’m doing all of this on my netbook, which is running Windows 7 Starter with 1Gb of ram and an Atom N450 processor; it cost about 2/3 of an iPad’s entry level price.  The performance is perfectly acceptable for all of this.  Yet on an iPad, I wouldn’t be able to efficiently do my homework in this way.  In fact, the easiest way on the iPad would be to print out my ebook (or have it on another reader device like the Kindle) while typing up my homework in Pages.  Sure, I could still play music in the background, but forget shuffling between a word processor, a web browser, and a PDF reader.

Sure, netbooks are underpowered.  But they are more capable than most people give them credit for.  Intel’s website about Atom processors and netbooks seems to insinuate that they cannot multitask, which is definitely not true.  You won’t want to have a 720p video playing at the same time that you’re running Photoshop on a netbook, but for the level of multitasking that most consumers want and need to do, netbooks are definitely up to the job.  And the iPad isn’t.

Apple has to see this, so the question is, will the next generation of iPad/iPhone software add multitasking, or will people be forced to simply live with the limitation?  Or will the public see this, and stick with netbooks/notebooks for general computing?  Only time will tell.  But misinformation and claiming that multitasking is only important to prosumers is simply unacceptable.

What situations do you find multitasking important in?  Or do you think running only one program at a time is sufficient?  Sound off in the comments, and let’s discuss it!

Update: And what a difference 12 hours can make!  Apple held its iPhone OS 4 unveiling hours after I wrote this article, with one of the major new features being multitasking support on iPhone 3G, 3GS, and iPad.  A couple points here: This update is not coming out until summer for iPhone and fall for iPad, so any early iPad adopters will still have to wait quite a while to utilize this on their device.  Additionally, this is still not full multitasking.  Only some services will be kept running, and everything else will be paused, so to me it sounds just like the limited multitasking that Windows Phone 7 was announced with (although Microsoft is still promising full multitasking via an update within the next year).  I still think my concerns here are valid; the iPad is still not as powerful of a multitasking computer as a netbook.  Thoughts?

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.