What I learnt from 3 months of being mobile only (well almost)

I lost my lovely Air on a train coming back from a ski race; yes, a few beers to celebrate the race were involved, guilty as charged your honor. For a bunch of silly reasons (guilt at my stupidity, cheapskateness, dithering about alternatives), I did not buy a replacement. So my work has (almost) all been done on my iPhone for over 3 months (after a few weeks I did think the experiment itself was interesting). The “almost” means occasional use of borrowed iPads and laptops.

(I have an iPhone, but this is equally true if I had an Android or even Windows phone; this is not about the device/OS battle).

1. Yes, the iPad is different. I don’t need market research to tell me that. It has a bigger screen so reading/watching is easier (I have been called Captain Obvious). I also don’t take it with me everywhere like I do my iPhone, so it is far less revolutionary/disruptive IMHO.

2. All repetitive stress is bad. Tapping is different from mouse stress. My takeaway is “mix it up”, use different devices for different things. Like really different, like using the phone/Skype or going to meet people face to face.

3. You don’t need to own devices that you primarily use to access to the cloud/Internet, but you do need to be respectful when using other people’s devices (log out and close windows/tabs).

4. When it is harder to write long emails, I am more motivated to “pick up the phone”. It used to be that we used email to escape constant phone interupts. That has reversed. It has become easier to talk to important influentials on the phone, they like the break from email.

5. Brevity is good and the pathetic on screen keyboard forces brevity.

6. Notes is invaluable. Yes, I wrote this on Notes. But not in one go. I wrote it over a couple of days as more thoughts occured to me while walking or waiting for a train. That enables creativity (well it does for me).

7. Don’t lose it but assume you will, back it up!

8. A laptop is an expensive word processor. There are longer pieces that need a proper keyboard/screen. Other creative work (eg video, photos, music£ also often need faster procssors and bigger peripherals.

9. You learn to be creative with tools. For example I love what I call LazyMail – record a message using Voice Memos and email it to somebody.

10. Nobody has yet built my ideal mobile device. This would be like the iPhone but with a wireless link to peripherals like headsets, screens, printers, keyboards etc. This probably needs standards evolution but also some genius UX engineering,

11. Buy Apple and Google stock. Forget all the other “portals”, the mobile phone is the uber portal. Banks for example ought to be very worried about Passbook.

12. Email to an external service is potentially disruptive. Disclosure, I am working on something like this. I loved Posterous for that but Twitter killed it. Never mind. I posted this to WordPress from Notes on my iPhone and it was automatically amplified on Twitter and LinkedIn.

13. There is usually an app for that and if there is not you just spotted a startup opportunity. My recent discovery is scanning from my iPhone to save the pain of begging time from somebody’s printer/scanner/laptop rig.

Bernard Lunn