Uh… not true. This is possible on the iPhone and will work the same way on the iPad. The iPod application *does* work in the background. You might not be able to use a third party app like Pandora, but the built-in app will keep on playing just fine.

One very important feature is that it fits into your photo bag and you can transfer photos from your camera or card to the iPad while on move or upload photos over 3G. 3G uploads are slow but often the only option and then it’s important that you don’t have to sit and wait for the transfers to finish. Besides, it’s not many laptops with 10 hour battery life something I really need for a day of shooting outside my studio.

I’ve had both an HP Tablet PC and a Samsung UMPC. I loved the form factor. Most of the time I was using them standing. With a laptop you always have to find a place to sit down and that’s impossible in many situations. The reasons why I gave up using the Tablet PC and UMPC was poor battery life, very slow to boot (minutes) and hopeless interaction design both with regards to the OS and the software. Apart from that, I loved it.

64 GB is not a lot but usually enough for a full day for me. On a trip it’s not enough but I will also backup to additional drives back at my hotel room anyway. CF card readers will fit into the USB adapter. After all, you don’t have a CF card reader bult-in to most laptops either.

This is definitely not a laptop replacement but with an iPad I will only travel with a single laptop (I need full redundancy on any critical equipment when traveling) and I can leave the laptop in the hotel room most of the time.

iPad should also be great for planning photo shoots, research, making sketches using Pogo Sketch etc. I think iPad will fit perfect into a pro photo workflow but primarily for planning and during the shoot where any existing computer doesn’t really work well at all.

iPad will be great for presenting photos. Of course it’s better with on an Eizo or Lacie but in a meeting outside your office then this has to be better than anything else. Just the fact that you can pass it around is great.

The resolution is not great but it’s pretty good and it’s very quick to zoom and move around in a photo. When a client inspect one of your photos on your laptop and he want to check something in full resolution, it’s not as simple.

Besides lots of photos have a vertical aspect ratio and you don’t turn a laptop on the side to fit the aspect ratio of a vertical photo. In other words, when displaying photos in a vertical aspect ratio, this has a higher resolution then for example a 15″ MacBook Pro. With a LED IPS display, the color reproduction and color space should be better than perhaps any laptop on the market so far.

In a few months I think a lot of software running on OS X will let iPad be used as an input device. A bit like a mix of a drawing board and Optimus Tactus (http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-tactus/).

I just hope the USB adapter will allow tethered capture.

Too early to say for sure but I think iPad will be great for photographers.