George Carlin wasn’t wrong when he used to complain about the tortured language used during air travel.

I just heard part of an announcement over the loudspeaker here in Phoenix: “…For your convenience, please use the adjacent parking facility.” For your convenience, please use? What the hell does that mean? At least put a subject in there. “An adjacent parking lot is available for your convenience.” That’s still a lie, but at least it’s a sentence. How about “No Parking here. Park over there” Plain. Simple. Direct. Not rude, just honest. No parking.

My battery went from 100% down to 58% in the two hours from leaving work to taking off in the airplane. I was listening to music, checking and writing a few emails. One or two texts in that time. Most of the time, screen off, just the iPod going.

On the plane now, where I’m forced into airplane mode, of course. Been watching videos, listening to music, typing posts and tweets or later publication, etc. Nonstop use for an hour and fifteen minutes. Battery is still at 58%. This happens all the time, too. Clearly, my poor AT&T signal is draining the crap out of my battery. Bluetooth and WiFi matter, too, of course. But even when I shut those off and just leave the phone itsef on, battery often goes dead in a few hours. And it varies from day to day, too. Will have to keep an eye on it this week. If I get good signal in El Paso, I’ll be curious to see how the battery does.

GoodReader: as much as I love that the Drobox and MobileMe Disk apps for iPhone give me easy access to stored files from the cloud, I have to admit that they both suck for reading long PDFs. GoodReader is an excellent, cheap way to navigate those giant user manuals.

FlightTrack Pro. I love this app for checking in on flight delays, gates, arrivals and departures. Comes in handy when I’m flying myself or picking up someone else. MotionX GPS Drive. Since this trip involves driving someone else’s car half way across the country, I needed to consider a good GPS app. I have SatNav in my own car, so I didn’t want either a standalone unit or a big, expensive package with subscription fees. I literally needed something for one week only. MotionGPS Drive seemed like the perfect solution. Not only did it get an excellent review from Andy Ihnatko, but it also has the perfect pricing option for me. $2.99 for the app, which comes with 30 days of free service. That’s all I need. If I want to use it again on another trip six months fom now, I pay a one-time fee of $2.99 for another 30 days of services. I tested it out a few times around my own neighborhood in the last week, just making sure it works well enough. All tests were successful. We’ll see how it performs in the actual trip. Dungeon Hunter. I’m minutes away from killng the Queen, but this game is bound to provide me with some great entertainment on my flight. Best game I’ve played yet on the iPhone. (Thank you, Jason at Webomatica, for the suggestion.) Avatar. Only Played this game for a few chapters so far, but very well done. Actually makes me want to see the movie. Crosswords. An old favorite. So addictive. Tweetie 2. Have to keep up with the Twitter somehow. Can’t think of a better way. I wish this guy made cars. The ultimate example of what an iPhone app should be. Picposterous. Just picked this one up. Let’s see of it works well enough for posting from the road. I’ll take the real photos with my trusty Nikon D40, but the iPhone works well for quick documentary shots. Mail and Safari. Of course. I use Google Reader in Safari to keep up with RSS feeds. Lots of other apps on the iPhone, of course. Music and videos loaded in, as well. If my battery doesn’t die too fast, and AT&T holds up somewhat, I should be good to go. I know those are big ifs, but I’m optimistic at this point.

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.