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Adelphos33

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Mar 13, 2012
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I am an iPad Pro user and love the split screen multi-tasking. Is the experience on the iPad Air 2 good? I was wondering if it was worth me looking into exchanging the iPad Pro 12.9" for the 9.7"...
 
It's absolutely fine. I was mostly using it for having a web browser open and messenger or Twitter in a strip on the right, but a few times I used it 50/50 for copying things from websites to a word document.

If you regularly need to have two apps up and active at the same time then you might prefer the comfort of having a 'portrait iPad Air' on each side. I think if I was copying and pasting between excel and word all day I'd want the larger screen. But then if I was doing that I'd also want a mouse ;)
 
It's absolutely fine. I was mostly using it for having a web browser open and messenger or Twitter in a strip on the right, but a few times I used it 50/50 for copying things from websites to a word document.

If you regularly need to have two apps up and active at the same time then you might prefer the comfort of having a 'portrait iPad Air' on each side. I think if I was copying and pasting between excel and word all day I'd want the larger screen. But then if I was doing that I'd also want a mouse ;)


So far I have used it to run either an office program (Word, Excel, OneNote, Pages) on one side and a web browser, Drop Box, Adobe, or some other app on the other side in 50/50 mode.
 
My IPP LTE on LEFT vs IPad Air 2 on Right. Absolutely able to do split-view but hell no I would want to work on that Air 2 all day. It's too small to be practical!

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Yup, it works fine, but if you spend a lot of time in 50-50, it's going to be on the small side as AliMacs says, I think. My own use though, I don't really have complaints. In my case, I don't really do 50-50, but rather the 2/3-1/3 split. If you mostly focus on one task, but have side tasks that overlap, it seems to work fine. Think, filing tasks away into Reminders/Things/OmniFocus/etc while reading your e-mail. Having a web page, mail or whatever up for reference while working on a document or presentation. I also tend to have file managers open sometimes if I'm moving more than just a couple files into the app I have open.
 
I think if you're just consuming, split view on a 9.7 iPad is fine. I have an Air 2 and it's doable.

If you're doing any creation, such as extensive writing, I think the 13" iPad is much better. I've tried to write in split view on my Air 2 and it was a "squinty" experience if you know what I mean. YMMV.
 
I also need to note - the main difference even as subtle as you may think - the IPP 13 is faster than the iPad Air 2. It's not just faster in specs it's the workflow type of feeling - when you slide Windows left to right, up/down, etc and the way it switches apps is just very fast to the point when you are using ONLY the air 2 you may not think of it but after using an IPP 13 you will witness it is faster.

The beauty of this larger display is that you don't have to scroll around too much and you see more stuff on screen even in 50/50 split view. The best part is the way iOS 9.0 is designed I feel Apple designed the split-view multitasking stuff directly for the IPP 13 display. You can simply work left and right Windows then even use notification widgets and after you are done with the widgets you can hit that "back to ...(your app)" link in the upper left corner to throw the original app back in its window space.

Combine this with an external keyboard and the entire experience changes substantially vs the 10" iPad Air 2.

What's cool about the split-view/multitasking on IOS is that if you use two fingers and move both windows around it works! I have Samsung devices that have split Windows and you cannot do this. You have to focus on one app at a time only. I can slide both safari and chrome browsers up and down together with two fingers between the Windows but I cannot do this on any android device.
 
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