Is an iPad a computer, or a tablet with an identity crisis?

Since Apple first launched the iPad in 2010, it has been a device in the middle of an identity crisis. Is it essentially a jumbo-sized phone? Or is it a computer? Or is it something new entirely?

This might sound like a silly nerd debate—a modern equivalent to “Is a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit?”, or “Is Die Hard a Christmas film?”—but it’s an important question for both Apple and people who use their products.

Why? Because the purpose tells the designers what they should be aiming for. If the iPad is a big phone, then it should be better designed for consumption—tasks like watching videos, reading books and scrolling social media.

But if it’s instead a serious work computer, then Apple should be working hard to make sure it is a great device to use for emails, video calls, writing documents and editing spreadsheets.

As things stand, Apple’s answer to this question isn’t obvious. But if you look at how the iPad has evolved over the years, you get a sense that Apple’s thinking has evolved from the former to the latter.

The first iPad was promoted as a place to read digital magazines and books, but more recently Apple has been majoring on the "productivity" features that help business people work.

And in my experience, it has actually got pretty good at this. Over the last few years, my iPad has become my go-to device for going on trips and for meetings outside of the home. If I’m meeting a colleague, it’s just as good for tapping out a few notes as a "full-size" laptop would be.

And it's certainly a great device for going through my emails on the train, or for sitting back in an armchair to read and review a PDF or another long document.

This raises an interesting question: could your next "computer" be an iPad? In fact, that was a question posed by Apple’s marketing a couple of years ago, when it ran ads with the simple tagline: “Your next computer is not a computer”.

So, could I go without a "real" computer and just use my iPad? Unfortunately for Apple, I don’t think it is quite there yet. And I think this becomes apparent once you try and do some real-world work.

For example, if you have a traditional laptop, then the chances are that you’ll have multiple apps open at once. Perhaps you’ll have your emails, Microsoft Word and a web browser running, so that as you write you can easily reference the document that your colleague sent to you—or research ideas for the important report that you’re writing.

But on an iPad, this is much harder to do. This isn’t just because most of the time the screen is smaller than a typical laptop (the standard iPad has an 11-inch screen, the larger model 13-inch); it is because the iPad device is designed primarily for selection by our big fat fingers, and not a precise little mouse-pointer.

Interfaces are typically less dense—meaning either fewer features or less space to fit everything into. I’ve found this most annoying when trying to navigate spreadsheets in both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.

Though I can view them on my iPad, which can be useful, editing is simply unwieldy compared to a computer. Especially because often app developers, even of tools like Google Docs and Microsoft Office, don’t tend to include all of the tools from the desktop versions of their apps on the iPad.

However, the most annoying problem is at a more philosophical level, and it comes down to how the iPad handles things behind the scenes. On a traditional computer, if you open too many apps, your computer will typically just slow down if you try to use them all at once.

But the iPad tries to be smart to make its battery last longer. So to create the illusion that it is always whizzy and fast, if you open too many apps it will simply…close the apps you’ve not used for a while.

Most of the time, you might not even notice this. Some apps are cleverly designed so that when you reopen them, they open up whatever you were looking at or working on last.

But not all are as smart. In my experience, if you’re flipping between multiple apps, you’ll quickly start to notice this.

For example, when writing this on my iPad, when I’d flick over to Twitter for a few minutes, and then flip back, the page kept scrolling back to the top, instead of remaining where I left it.

So is the iPad really ready to be your next computer? If all you need is something to check your emails, make a few notes and browse Facebook…then maybe.

But if you’re trying to do something a little bit more serious, like me, when I wrote this column, perhaps you’re best sticking with a traditional computer for a little longer.