I am trying to understand the significance of a multi-tasking OS for IPAD or IPhone for that matter. Also, I am attempting to understand the meaning of the the term multi-tasking in this sense. Because to me this seems to be a preemptive multitasking or a task switching system. The reason I state this is to me true multi-tasking means more than one application is actually processing , as opposed to be running. The difference is huge and I do not know how that would be accomplished within this hardware architecture. A system can be preemptive while giving the illusion of multi-tasking, this would be accomplished by dispatching a background task while the user is reading a web page (for example), when the user wishes to navigate to a new page this task is dispatched and the running background task is preempted. Is this what is occurring?