TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Lukas Mathis:

So when I bought a TouchPad after HP discontinued it, I never assumed that I would use it for actual work. But I am doing just that. I’m using it to respond to email, to do research on the Internet, to take notes during meetings.

So why was it so easy for me to use the TouchPad for work, but not the iPad? I think it’s because there are a number of things the TouchPad does that make it more suitable for work.

He points out some of the areas where webOS was dramatically ahead of iOS, such as multitasking. In webOS, you can start an email draft, switch back to an email you’re replying to, or even start another draft, very easily. That isn’t possible in iOS. (You can, of course, save the draft, go back to your inbox, read the email, go to your drafts folder and open it up again—which shows precisely how far behind iOS is in this area.)

Over the next few years, iOS needs to improve significantly in these sorts of ways—the unsexy kinds of things that make an operating system much more useful for work.