A while ago I suggested on Twitter that the solution to iPad’s lack of multitasking is buying multiple iPads. People thought I was joking. When I shared the same idea with my coworkers they didn’t take me seriously either. Then a couple of weeks ago I came across an interesting piece in Newsweek in which the Fake Steve Jobs interviews the real Steve Wozniak. The interview itself is about what The Woz thinks of the iPad but it ends with the following gem on multitasking:
Wozniak: …By the way, I solved the problem of battery life and [the lack of] multitasking on the iPhone.
Interviewer: Really?
Wozniak: Yeah. I just have two iPhones, so if the battery runs down on the first one, I can use the other. And if I’m talking on one, I can use the other one to look something up. You would not believe how much use I get out of that.
Perhaps my idea wasn’t so far-fetched after all.
Sure, ditching your current setup and replacing it with multiple tablet computers would mean quite a change in how you use your computer. But many people would likely be perfectly happy with the alternative. Like those people, for example, who are ordering iPads faster than Apple can manufacture them.
With iPads having neither a keyboard nor a mouse and being small enough so that you can have several of them in front of you, I imagine switching between them should be a snap. Also, the added screen real estate of what is essentially a multi-monitor setup should also make it easier to work with multiple apps at the same time.
Of course, this idea is not new at all. You may have even seen it on TV decades ago. A user called derefr left the following comment over at HackerNews when I mentioned my idea:
[Using multiple iPads] makes complete sense to me—remember the scenes in Star Trek where someone is sitting at a desk absolutely covered in PADDs, each doing one little thing? We just need to wait for the price to come down :)
Being located in Europe, coming across even one, let alone two or three iPads has proven to be a bit difficult for me. So if someone reading this has had the chance to try working with more than one iPad at the same time it would be great to hear how well it works and what problems you’ve run into.
