Life before and after smartphones

"I think smartphones have made it possible to channel-surf life." -- Lisa Hoag, October 2011

Being the smart-ass that I am, I translate "smart" in marketing-speak as "stupid". I got the idea from a ~2007 ordeal with a SmartLF large-format scanner, which was a cheap piece of crap made from 5 regular-size CCD sticks staggered end to end with some overlap, all fed through an 8-port USB hub and stitched together by a buggy .NET program. Much too clever. Color variations were unavoidable, and it required constant recalibration and vigilance and a lot of luck to avoid gaps and distortions along the stitch lines. AAARGH!

So, smartphone = stupidphone? Well, I ordered one anyway. My life may never be the same again.

Smartphones (and tablets) totally remind me of the StupidLF saga. The past few weeks I've been playing around with other peoples' iPhones and Droids and even a Palm Pixi. And especially my sister's iPad 2, because it was sitting around at Mom's house. She got it "for her college courses" but found it lacking for everything except Angry Birds and Youtube (actually that's just conjecture; I haven't seen her using it because she's too damn busy). 2011-11-25 note: she said she likes her Dell laptop better than the iPad2... hear that, Apple fanbois?! :)

A day with an iPad 2

The iPad is decidedly slick. Thin, light, clear, shiny, smooth, elegant, efficient. We expect no less from Apple. If you've seen someone using one for a few minutes, you know what to do: tap, swipe, pinch, hit the button to get out of whatever you're in. It's great for photos, videos, maps, web browsing, reading (especially with Instapaper -- thanks to Dan Lieberman for telling me about that), checking email, etc.

The author expresses his frustration with the iPad 2

(Photo by Nevin Robi... with his iPhone 4)

The iPad has shortcomings, though, which quickly become apparent when you go beyond simple passive activities. Try writing an email, entering a website URL, or searching for a word on a web page. BOOM, the virtual keyboard fills up half the screen (or a mere third, in vertical orientation). Oh, you need to type a number? Tap the "123" button. Punctuation? That's under "123" also... or is it the other one? I can't remember. Try both. Now I forget what website I wanted to go to. I'm going to A P P L E S U C K S .com .... uhh, where's the ENTER key? Ah there, it's labeled GO! How counterintuitive.

Text selection on the iPad is a pain in the ass. Hold your finger on the text for a second, wait for the magnifying glass to appear, then drag your finger to the right. NOT LEFT! Steve Jobs didn't think of that! And don't let go or you'll have to start over. Don't move too fast or you'll go flying down the page! Niiiiiiccccceeee aaaannnnddd slooooooooooooooooow. Actually, you can double-tap a word to select it, then drag your finger to select other words. I think you can even go left. It's much faster. But it still sucks.

It gets worse. At least my rich text editor demo actually works on iDevices (with iOS 5), but not very well. To italicize some text, I must select it. D'oh! When I select it, the Cut/Copy/Paste buttons cover up the bold/italic buttons. I could press Control-I.... if the virtual keyboard HAD a Control key! Oh well, I guess I've gotta ask the programmer to move those buttons to the side, when he's done writing blogs :)

I have a few suggestions for iOS 6:

1. Virtual arrow keys to move the text cursor
2. Some kind of "virtual mouse" (or a Blackberry-style thumb mouse on new iGadgets)
3. "Clicks" should be under your fingertip, not just above it (because that cleverness backfires when you hold your hand "upside down")

Two years with a netbook

The author expresses his frustration with his netbook

(Photo by Sara Novelli, with a real camera :-)

The EeePC 1001P is the closest I've come to using a "mobile" device. As a touch-typist, I love the keyboard. It's slightly undersized, but not cramped. There's no numeric keypad, but with a little practice, I developed speed and accuracy with the underappreciated top-row number keys. The 1024x600 screen, however, simply SUCKS. I can typically only use 1/4 of it (see screenshot, below). Considering that the average user has many more toolbars (search bars, weather, smiley faces, antivirus, malware, etc) it's unsurprising that netbooks didn't really catch on.

That said, the netbook is a complete portable computer with 6-8 hours of battery life. Unlike the iPad, I can swap the battery, I can type fast, and I can afford a netbook. I use it for real everyday programming, with a fullscreen VIM editor. VIM is actually what sold me on the netbook. Any other editor (besides EMACS) would require a larger screen.

At the office, I plug in a mouse and a 24" 1920x1080 monitor, and presto! A real computer. I leave VIM running fullscreen on the netbook, and a few browser windows on the big screen above it. I think it's actually better than my side-by-side dual-screen setup at home. And the small keyboard means I don't have to reach as far for the mouse.

Netbooks are a bit slow, but good enough for web development. I keep my big computer in my music studio at home... audio is realtime CPU-intensive. Occasionally I need to transcode video to H.264 or WebM when I'm at work, but not in realtime, so the netbook serves.

Toolbars, headers, and sidebars often claim at least 75% of a netbook's 1024x600 screen area.

Smartphones > Netbooks > Tablets

The problem with netbooks and tablets alike is, they're an awkward size. Too big to carry around all the time, but too weak for serious work and play. In other words, unnecessary technological clutter.

The smartphone I'm getting is an HTC Thunderbolt with a 4.3" 800x480 touchscreen... slightly less than my 10" 1024x600 netbook, but more than the 12" 640x480 and 320x200 screens I grew up with. It's a big phone, yet it fits more comfortably in my pocket than my 3-year-old Nokia flip-phone. Like many newer smartphones, it has an HDMI video port, so I can plug it into my 24" 1920x1080 monitor just like a netbook. (2011-11-25 correction: I was thinking of another phone... maybe the Samsung Infuse?) It runs Android, which is basically just another flavor of UNIX. Hmmm.... can I add a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and give up the netbook?

Not so fast... smartphones suffer most of the same shortcomings as tablets. And, their UIs are designed for 4" touchscreens, not for keyboards and mice and 24"+ monitors.

Why I bit the bullet

My main motivations for getting a smartphone were:

1. Centralized communications (email, text, chat, voice, web)
2. Mobile web development (must eat own dogfood)

However, I think it's only a matter of time before smartphones subsume ALL personal computing functions.

Paper

My smartphone will not replace paper notebooks. Sure, I'll enter a few notes into the phone if it's all I have on hand, but pen and paper is easier in every sense of the word (convenient, familiar, and practical). On paper, you can draw sketches, underline, circle, highlight, insert notes anywhere on the page, etc.... without thinking about scrolling and zooming and editing modes.

On paper, you can take shorthand! At right is an example of Gregg Shorthand, the predominant English-language shorthand system. It takes some serious determination to get the hang of it, but it's very cool IMHO. There are 3 layers to it: 1) reducing pen movement by representing each letter (or phoneme) by a single line, arc, or loop; 2) omitting vowels (loops); and 3) standard and personalized abbreviations. In practice, I only use a few common abbreviations such as sp=spoke, re=regard, bs=business, f=for, w=with, and the usual text-messaging abbreviations (many of which date back to the telegraph era or before!)

That photo looks like shit because it was taken with my netbook's 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera (which, to be fair, was only intended for Skype and for Facebook mugshots). I had to place the notebook on a table under a bright light (not too bright!), hold my netbook upside down, reach around and hit the space bar to take a photo, and repeat several times from different angles and distances because I couldn't see the screen. It would've been easier to hook up my old scanner.

My smartphone will have an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with dual LED flash. Optics aside, that's better than our trusty 7-megapixel Canon camera. How often will I really need a separate still camera, video camera, or scanner?

I could use my smartphone as a "pocket scanner"; it should work fine for business cards, whiteboards, notes, etc -- anything where it's the information that matters, not color fidelity or scaling accuracy. Likely result: less typing and computer drawing -- more paper, whiteboards, etc!

Well, I'll be back in a few days to report on my firsthand experience with the smartphone.......

...if I can summon the attention span to write a blog.