One of the great things about my job is that I get to spend a lot of time talking to different people about technology. Specifically, media technology.

Some of those people are experts, who tell me things I didn't know. But some of them aren't, and I'm supposed to be the one telling them about things they don't know. Which is actually when I really get to learn about the kind of things that really matter.

If I'm telling someone about some revolutionary new technology that they don't understand, then that tells me that either I'm not doing a good job of explaining it, or it isn't going to be all that revolutionary in the near future. And if I'm telling them about the problems with some revolutionary technology and they don't understand the problem, then that tells me that these problems aren't really a big deal either.

That's pretty much what I've learnt about multitasking on the iPhone and iPad. It doesn't matter that it doesn't do it. If you're a nerd like me, then you want your machine to be doing all sorts of things at once. You want your email, music, twitter client, a couple of presentations, a spreadsheet or two, some sort of organiser or to-do list, a notepad, and a few other bits and pieces running in the background that you can flip between.

But the fact is that most of the time, "multitasking" sits in one of two categories. Either, you're running something in the background (like your music player), or you're flicking between two apps- say, reading a PDF while working in another application, or working on one presentation while copying slides from another. Unless you've got more than one screen, then you probably aren't actually using two applications at once.

(Incidentally, if you work with computers a lot, you really should have more than one monitor so that you can effectively multitask, and actually use more than one application at a time. You probably don't, but you probably should.)

The thing about modern computing is that you probably do have more than one screen. Your mobile phone is a great second screen to have your email, or your music, or your Twitter application running away in the background. Or to have a PDF that you're writing about. Or a web page that you're replying to.

I can't imagine any point in time when you're likely to have an iPad, but not have a mobile phone with you. I can't imagine any case when a mobile phone camera wouldn't be more useful than an iPad camera (other than for video calls– but for that case, a laptop or desktop computer would be better than either.) I can't imagine any time when having your email application in the background on an iPad would be more useful than an email application running in the background on your mobile phone.

When it comes to actually using these machines, we don't really "multitask." There's an idea called "continuous partial attention", which is that when we're 'multitasking' between different things, we're not paying full attention to anything; we're paying full attention to one thing, with other things going on in the background.

It's always going to be easier to flip your attention between screens than to flip focus between different applications on the same device. And that's the main reason why the lack of multitasking on something like the iPad or iPhone isn't really a big deal. Switching between applications quickly while they pause in the background– that's a useful function. Running one in the background, on a device that isn't going to be used for intensive computing tasks (ie. processing some heavy data) isn't something that many people are going to use– let alone need. And if you need that kind of power, then why would you be using a lightweight device like an iPad instead of a "full powered" PC?)

It's like third party applications or copy and paste on the original iPhone. It's a nice thing to have, sure– but it's not something that you can't live without when it isn't there. And in a future generation, when processing is 'cheaper', battery life is 'cheaper', when the device is more established, there will probably be a way to do "true" multitasking (or, more accurately, run third party applications in the background.)

It's nice that it's coming. But it doesn't matter.