I disagree,but I personally have no use for a Ipad/labtop/tablet. lol

Who doesn't shower with it?


and I actually take my ipad to the toilet all the time.. nothing better then taking a shit and surfing on this site..

Its so useful and easy to just pick up and do whatever with. Now i have no use for a laptop and less use for a PC.

that's just over-kill for me. I don't love any device that much. hahaha.

I don't know if it's funny or sad that one can own a device that they didn't even know was that useful or essential prior to owning one, but the iPad does tend to fall into that category for many of its owners.

If nothing else, they will make a lot of users realize just how many of their essential PC tasks don't have to be tethered to laptop, much less a desktop PC.

Previous mobile OS, like Symbian or WM, have multi-tasked in a similar fashion to the PC market. And by multi-tasking you think of processes running simultaneously. I understand why the current method is used in mobile devices, but I would not call it multi-tasking just resuming.

About the memory used, I think the recent list uses some memory for caching the icon images and names, just like iOS does this for its multiple screens. Tell us how your test goes, I'm sure it does use some memory, but is it negligible?

Tablets aren't mature enough yet. Or maybe it's batteries that actually aren't, preventing tablets from having the power to express their full potential.

For those interested, here's the device RichardHutnik got:

http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=12429602

though it's cheaper on Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Sylvania-SYNET7LP-7-Inch-Tablet-Black/dp/B004GKM60W


As for iPad vs Other Tablets, there's absolutely nothing that any type of iPad can do that one of the dozens of Android tablets out there can't do, but there ARE things that some Android tablets can do that iPads cannot.

For instance, how many iPads out there have removable storage? How many iPads have 128GB storage? How many first-party iPad keyboards are there?

If you want full-featured tablets, you're going to want to go with a high-end Android tablet. You'll pay about the same as an iPad, but you'll get more features.

But if you don't want those features and maybe instead want a larger community with a wider spectrum of third-party accessories, then iPad's for you.

But if you don't want to pay a billion dollars and are willing to sacrifice some relatively minor features (front camera, screen size, screen resolution, possibly a little power, or (on the ultra-cheap models), multitouch screen), then a cheaper Android tablet will be for you.

Apps can and do run in the background (are executing code, using CPU cycles and memory) but few are coded to do so. It's just not efficient given the limited resources of modern tablets. Plus, the general idea of a tablet is not to ape the PC experience, nor design it around user upgraded hardware specifications. As wasteful as it sounds, tablets really are devices more or less designed to be chucked or replaced every 2-3 years; that's the user's hardware upgrade. 

But back to iOS. The invisible to the user hierarchy goes from active app (running onscreen in foreground), inactive (device in sleep mode, app in foreground), background (still executing code, using CPU cycles and memory), suspended (in memory, not executing code) and finally, not running (not launched or terminated). Most apps running in background quickly transistion to suspended, barring those specifically coded to continue running in background. From what I can observe by terminating apps via the multitask "apps recenly opened" menu, effectively force quits any running app regardless of state. Suspended apps terminated in such a manner immediately free up memory as observed with a memory tracking utility. But the iOS memory manager automatically terminates apps, purging them from suspended as needed. Once memory resources approach capacity, iOS takes control in determining which apps to purge from memory. Apps returning to the "not running" state remain in the "recently opened" menu along with any background or suspended apps.

I'm sure there are enough users who would like to know the status of any recently opened apps in the menu to warrant indicator additions in later iOS iterations, but the reality is, none of that actually matters to 99% of all iOS users, and not because they're not "power users" but because iOS was engineered and designed to manage memory and CPU resources automatically. 

That is the model, and it does the job for me. Is it perfect? No way. But it does the job. It is advanced enough to read PDFs.