It depends what you're doing with it. I find that if I sit doing nothing in a somewhat boring meeting, my mind will wander and I'll often zone out completely.

It depends what you're doing with it. I find that if I sit doing nothing in a somewhat boring meeting, my mind will wander and I'll often zone out completely. Whereas if I use my phone to play simple visual games which don't require any language processing (e.g. freecell), I'm much more able to concentrate on what the speaker is saying. It's not quite as good as listening properly, but overall I think listening to everything with half an ear (or more) is better than missing parts of the meeting entirely. And if anything directly relevant comes up I can stop and focus.