This morning, I shut down my laptop and left it in the apartment. While this may sound like a normal thing for a person to do, for me it’s very strange behavior, indeed.
Inspired by my friend Jason over at Webomatica, who recently took a trip armed with only an iPhone for his technology needs, I’ve decided that the trip I’ll be taking this week will be iPhone-only as well. Let’s see exactly how much of the functionality my laptop normally provides can be handled by this little pocket wonder.
To put this into better context, let me explain that I’ve been a laptop guy since 1996. I bought my first PowerBook Wall Street that year, thinking I’d use it as a companion computer to my desktop tower. Within a few weeks my tower was permanently switched off, and the Wall Street was my only computer. I’ve had many PowerBooks and MacBook Pros since then, and they travel with me everywhere. I bring the laptop to work every day, despite having both a Windows PC and a Mac Pro at my desk. I bring it to coffee shops. And, most importantly, I always bring it with me on trips—even short weekend trips. So this trip will indeed be interesting.
I haven’t been a week without a laptop since 1996, in other words.
A couple of factors has made this experiment somewhat safe for me, however. First, the trip itself, which involves an initial couple of short airplane rides, first to a layover in Phoenix, then to El Paso, TX. Following that will be a few days in El Paso, with a trip across the border to Juarez, Mexico at some point for a few hours. Then, the trip home will be a drive, from El Paso back to San Francisco. Along the way, the New Mexico and Arizona desert, perhaps the Grand Canyon, if it’s not snowing too hard, and Santa Barbara, or somewhere similar in southern CA, to warm it up a bit.
The short flights mean that I won’t need my laptop on the plane. To tell the truth, I haven’t opened my laptop on a plane in several years, anyway. (I fly in economy. Try opening a 17-inch MacBook Pro in those seats.) The iPod and then the iPhone have both suited me just fine for music/movies/games/reading for years. So in-air entertainment is covered. I don’t like working on the plane, if at all possible.
The rest of the trip will be long days of driving, and I’ll be doing 100% of that driving. So there’s no way I could get any use out of a laptop during those hours. Hotel WiFi is a hit or miss proposition; sometimes it works. Sometimes it’s free. When it’s not free, it’s usually not worth paying for.
It’s also Christmas week, so I won’t have any emergency work projects to do. The office is dead as a doornail this time of year.
And then there’s the iPhone itself. After several iterations of the Treo, each one successively replacing more of the functions I needed a laptop for on the road, the iPhone has become the first phone to actually surpass my laptop in some areas. Obviously I can get my email, search the web, use Google Maps. But looking for a nearby restaurant or hotel is actually better on my iPhone than on my laptop. Built-in GPS and always-on connectivity (keeping my fingers crossed with AT&T) make it unthinkable to whip a laptop out of a bag for these functions.
And thanks to Posterous, I’ll be able to blog with my iPhone as well. Jason ran into some troubles in this area, due to the WordPress app’s limitations on the iPhone. But posting to Posterous is literally as easy as sending an email. So I’m covered there.
So the experiment begins today at 2 p.m. I leave work, hop on a BART train to the airport, and take off at 4:30.
Next up, the apps I’ve brought for the trip. Let’s see how well-prepared I am for this journey.
