A cold sweat and a test

I live in San Francisco and travel to Sunnyvale, California to the office pretty much every day that I’m not on an airplane. It’s about a 50-mile drive. Last Friday, I got to the office and opened the trunk of my car as usual to get my laptop bag, but it wasn’t there. A cold sweat of panic washed over me thinking that I must have left it on top of the car and drove off with it tumbling down the back hitting the ground only to be pounced on by the street people and never to be seen again. While doing a mental inventory of my laptop bag contents, I made a call to the nanny back at the house and it turns out I had left it sitting inside by the front door. Apparently, I just walked right past it on the way out. I had a choice to either go back to SF to get my laptop or forge ahead with nothing but my smartphone in hand. I decided this would be a good time to experiment. Plus, having a number of meetings lined up that morning there just wasn’t time to “run” back home and get the laptop. So, I decided to see how far I could go in the day’s business with just the smartphone. I had already gotten away from the habit of dragging my laptop to most meetings and just use the smartphone to take notes, check email, work my calendar and, of course, Google. But still, it felt a bit silly/strange to be sitting at my desk with a dark monitor and an empty laptop docking station with only my phone in hand pecking away madly on email.

I made it to just past noon. I got stuck when I couldn’t access the company’s internal systems from my smartphone. The experiment was interesting from three aspects: I didn’t have access to my stored laptop data which made me feel a little uncomfortable (you just never know when you need to refer to an archived email or file); the thumb typing slowed me way down; and if I wanted to work on a spreadsheet, presentation, or write my next blog, I couldn’t because the apps I use don’t run in my smartphone OS environment.

These problems are certainly solvable by cloud computing provided you have a good connection, but that isn’t always a given. Google Apps can replace the installed-on-the-hard drive office productivity applications. On-board storage is getting cheaper and cheaper and soon you’ll be able to get tens of gigabytes of flash storage for your smartphone for relatively cheap. Storing your data in the cloud is also becoming more commonplace. The only issue that has me a bit bugged is the user interface. Typing with thumbs will just never be as fast as 10-finger typing. However, I’m sure there will be a docking station similar to what the iPhone uses for music that will enable you to plug your smartphone into a corporate or home network with attached keyboard and monitor and you’re good to go. But getting and remaining connected will be the Achilles heel. I just got off an American Airlines flight to LA and was able to get on the Internet with their new in-flight connection service and work my email and send text messages. It was great until we hit 10,000 feet on descent and it unceremoniously cut me off.

We’re getting there.