The iPad 2 has a simpler app management process than the Galaxy Tab 10.1. For example, it's easy to arrange your home screens to cluster applications both on your iPad and on your desktop via iTunes; you can also put them in your own folders. Just tap and hold any app to invoke the "shaking apps" status, in which you can drag apps wherever you want, or tap the X icon to delete them (press the Home button when done to exit that mode). You can also arrange and delete apps using iTunes on your desktop.
Like the Android smartphones and other Android tablets, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 lets you drag apps to any of its home screens, which appear in preview mode below the apps matrix. (Unlike with Android smartphones, you cannot long-tap an app to move it to the current home screen.) The full list of programs is available in the apps page, which you access by tapping the Apps button at the upper right of any home screen. But the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has no groups capability for presenting apps, and you can't rearrange the roster in the apps page -- just in the home screens.
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 supports the Android OS's widgets feature. Widgets are mini apps that you can place on the home screens, and they can be very helpful, showing the latest email message or Facebook update or the current time in a large clock. Thus, you can see at a glance the current status of whatever you want to easily track -- one of Android's superior UI capabilities. The Galaxy Tab, like other Android devices, also has pop-up notifications that make it easy to see if you have new email or other alerts, whatever you happen to be doing. Alerts appear in the lower right of your screen, not at the top as in Android smartphones. Again, the iPad 2 has no equivalent, though Apple has promised that feature this fall.
The iPad 2's iOS 4.3 supports multitasking if enabled in the apps themselves; Apple has made , rather than let each app run full-on in parallel, as on a PC. As you switch among iOS apps, they suspend, except for their multitasking-enabled services, which conserves memory and aids performance. By contrast, Android supports full multitasking, whereby default apps continue to run in the background when you take care of other duties. From a usage point of view, these differences aren't apparent; on both devices, apps appear to multitask the same.
The major difference related to multitasking is the UI for switching among apps. On the iPad 2, a double-click on the Home button pulls up a list of active apps, and it's easy to see what's running and switch among them. On the Galaxy Tab 10.1, a persistent menu icon provides access to all running apps at any time, and it even shows a preview window of what the apps are currently doing (as with Mac OS X and Windows 7 in their taskbars).