The ability for the processor to work on more than one task at a time is an important feature of the Pocket PC environment. For many day-to-day activities, this can be a mixed blessing. On your iPAQ, every time you launch a new application, the other application keeps running in the background, just as on your Windows desktop. However, because you don’t see the other applications, this can get a little confusing. Suddenly, you have several applications open and running at the same time. With a little practice, this isn’t hard to manage. The Palm OS, on the other hand, does not support multitasking, which means that every time you start a new application, that action effectively closes the previous application. This is a simple, tidy way to work and is very effective on a hand-held device, but can be limiting in more complex work environments. Multitasking can become an extremely valuable feature as you learn to expand your PDA experience beyond the basic built-in applications. For example, with multitasking, you can connect to your wireless provider and download your e-mail in the background while surfing the Web and pasting information from a web site into your Pocket Word document. This complex activity isn’t possible on the majority of the Palms currently in circulation. Palm’s latest OS5 release is technically multitasking, but they licensed the technology from a third party and are expressly forbidden as part of the agreement from exposing the multitasking capabilities to developers. This limits the ability to do multitasking on even the newest Palm platform.

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