Multitaskers wanted!

Multitasking is one of the buzzwords of today. You only have to read through a couple of job ads to see that in most jobs, you just have to multitask. But did you know that you can multitask on your S60 device as well? This feature is one the strong points of S60 and it has been around from the beginning. Even though it may not be obvious at first, it really makes using your S60 device a lot more fun and productive.

Using it is very simple. Just press the menu button for a couple of seconds and you get the list of active applications. You can then switch between applications as well as close them (by pressing the “c” key). In other words, you can leave one application open, go to some other application and return via the list.

A couple of examples when I use the multitasking:
1) If I need to send a couple of sentences from a Word document as SMS here’s what I do. I open the Word document with Quickword, copy the text I want, open the messaging app and start creating a new message. Now I can paste the copied text to the SMS. To go back to Word document to get the second sentence, I just press the menu key for a couple of seconds to see the list of open apps. Now I just scroll to Quickword, select the sentence I want, copy it, press the menu key for a couple of seconds, scroll to Messaging and paste the other sentence to the SMS message.

2) Suppose I’m reading an interesting article in the internet and want to send a couple of highlights from it to my colleagues. Instead of copying the text, I want to write the SMS simultaneously while reading the web page. Just like in the previous example I use the multitasking feature to switch between the browser and messaging editor.

These are just a few examples. It would be nice to know your favorite ways as well.

Don’t be afraid to give the menu key a good long press. It won’t break