iPhone 5 For Dummies, 6th Edition

Multitasking

Back when Apple introduced the iOS 4 software upgrade (which, of course, predated iOS 5 and iOS 6), the company added a bevy of important features, with the long-overdue multitasking feature arguably the most significant. Multitasking simply lets you run numerous apps in the background simultaneously or easily switch from one app to another. For example, music from a third-party app such as Slacker can play in the background while you surf the web, peek at pictures, or check e-mail. Before multitasking hit the iPhone, Slacker would shut itself down the moment you started performing tasks in another app. (Previously, Apple did let you multitask by, for example, playing audio in the background with its iTunes app. But multitasking was limited to Apple’s own apps, not those produced by outside developers.)

But that’s not all. If you use an Internet voice-calling app such as Skype, you’ll be able to receive notification of an incoming call even if you haven’t launched the Skype app. The multitasking feature also lets a navigation app employing GPS update your position while you’re listening to an Internet radio app such as Pandora. From time to time, the navigation app or Apple’s own Maps app, which arrived with iOS 6, will pipe in with turn-by-turn directions, lowering the volume of the music so you can hear the instructions.

And if you’re uploading images to a photo website and the process is taking longer than you’d like, you can switch to another app, confident that ...