The iPad looks really terrific. I could easily see one lying around here in the living room somewhere. I could find the use for some nice piece of hardware that is easy to grab and start browsing, typing, or emailing on.

Most comments I hear are about a missing camera and multitasking. The camera just seems an obvious growthpath for Apple to me and I’m not surprised it didn’t make it in the first version. Although it would have been very nice in combination with a version of iChat to go with it.

Multitasking however would be something that I would really miss on a device this size. On the iPhone I rarely really miss it – switching between apps with the speed they do while retaining their current state is something that was easy to get used to with such a small screen. Now with the bigger iPad screen, I would love to put things in parallel, from different applications and within one application. I haven’t seen the possibility of putting two sites, or to iWork documents next to each other in the demos, let alone a site in Safari and a Pages document. This is something that isn’t too hard to imagine to be very handy. Add to that some messenger or twitter application running in the background, and you got your environment really going.

If the first version of the iPad doens’t support multitasking, at least it should support the Dashboard. In my opinion this would be the ideal place for the iPad to hide common functionality like the calculator, weather app and twitter client. It is easily accessible (with a specific gesture, for example), web-based and therefor not really running two apps at once. It would be really awkward to switch to another application (or get your iPhone out of your pocket) just to do a quick calculation when e.g. typing in Pages.

Speaking of which, I couldn’t find the Weather and Calculator apps in any of the screenshots of the iPad I’ve seen. Maybe Apple is already working on a Dashboard?