On tablets, I've seen just two approaches to multitasking work well--and neither one is in use by the market leaders. The first is the jog-wheel approach of some Android widgets (such as on the Lenovo IdeaPad K1, where you can move through apps that you choose to add to the wheel at the touch of a finger). And the second is the horizontal-scroll-bar approach of WebOS on the TouchPad (and, to be fair, on the QNX-based BlackBerry PlayBook, another tablet on life support right now). The horizontal-scroll design is much more finger friendly than Google's vertical-scroll "recently accessed" pop-up. Apple's approach is great on the iPhone, but on the iPad it's annoying to have to move your finger all the way down to the bottom of the tablet--far from the iPad's center of gravity--just to change apps.

Apple, Google: See how you can rework what you're doing now into something even better. The more I use tablets, the more I find that even though the bottom of the screen is useful for menus and buttons, navigation requiring two hands (such as multitasking) is better situated in the center of the screen.

Software can always be transformed. Android is particularly malleable, thanks to its open nature. Already I've seen numerous takes on Android 3.x Honeycomb, such as reskins of annoying buttons and changes to the settings pop-up. But the base, stock Android falls a bit short--after all, tablet makers wouldn't be customizing the OS if Google had nailed the Honeycomb interface in the first place.

So what did I like about ? I liked the notifications system--though I fear that with my email volume, I'd have worn my fingers out flicking through incoming notifications. I loved the settings shortcut pop-up: One touch at the top of the display, and the menu gave me access to brightness, Wi-Fi, VPN, Bluetooth, airplane mode, rotation lock, and mute--in other words, most of the settings I might need quick access to. Android has some of these settings up front, but not all of them. Samsung's new TouchWiz UX rework of Honeycomb, as seen on the Galaxy Tab 10.1, adds these features to Android's quick-settings menu, but you need to scroll through them. I liked the simplicity of the menu in WebOS. Heck, I liked the clean simplicity of most menus in WebOS--something that Android can learn from (yes, Google, full disclosure is useful, and information is power, but your settings menus remain a turn-off for the average consumer).