While vendors such as Citrix and Wyse have worked hard to foster the perception that the iPhone has what it takes to be a desktop virtualization end-point, the limitations imposed by the 3.5 inch display are painfully visible. Now with the iPad just around the corner screen size is no longer a problem, but this doesn't mean that Windows on the iPad is assured of success. Setting aside the obvious ergonomic limitations that the lack of physical keyboard imposes, perhaps the most significant shortcoming of the iPad the lack of support for multitasking. Accepting that one of the primary selling points of the iPhone/iPad is the availability of countless numbers of applications, it's doesn't take much to understand that users might want multitasking. However, while the iPhone 3.X operating system does offer preemptive multitasking. Apple have hobbled it so that multitasking support is restricted only to those applications that Apple grants approval to (in reality this means a subset of Apple developed applications). Which leads to the rather bizarre situation where the only way to get unrestricted multitasking on an iPad is to use it as a thin-client connected back to a remote desktop.
