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.

Today, John Gruber from Daring Fireball is asking Andy Rubin what he has to say for himself now, since he predicted that Google wouldn’t make its own Android phone.

As far as I can tell, Google isn’t making its own Android phone. It hired HTC to build it a phone that will be sold through T-Mobile. How is that any different from the G-1? The Hero? The myTouch? The Droid? Sure, Google may sell an unsubsidized version for an astronomical price as well on its own, but that’s neither novel nor likely to change sales figures by much.

Again, the Google zealots are letting themselves be spun into a frenzy over nothing. Two months ago, the Droid was god’s gift to the mobile phone universe. Today, it’s Nexus One. Tomorrow it’ll be some other phone. We’ve been here before.

A lot of people are speculating about Google’s new “mobile lab”, which is a phone that was commissioned from HTC that Google is giving to select worldwide Google employees in order to test some new Android features. At least, that’s what I gathered from Google’s actual statement on the matter.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s exactly what Microsoft did with Plays for Sure and the Zune. And we all know how that worked out.

To add more fuel to the fire, some have even speculated that the G-phone won’t be tied to any carrier, but be sold directly by Google. Sure. Because everyone wants to pay $700 for a new phone that they’re only going to be able to use on one carrier, anyway.

When are people going to realize that there is no single phone in existence that can run on both Verizon and AT&T? The choice is an illusion, people.

But this time it’s Google making a monumental blunder, not Microsoft, so everything is going to work out just fine. That is, if Google is actually dumb enough to make this blunder, which I’m not convinced it is. I think perhaps Google is just testing some new features for Android, which it will then make available to all Android phone manufacturers. They may debut these new killer features on a specific phone, but that phone will most likely be tied to a contract of some sort, and exclusive to one carrier in the U.S., at least at first.

Any way you slice it, Android isn’t going to make any inroads at beating the iPhone anytime soon. If that were the goal, Google would have a major problem on its hands. If the goal of Android is instead to simply make Google services more ubiquitous across mobile handsets everywhere by putting the final nail into the coffin of Windows Mobile, then I think Android has already succeeded.

If Google is thinking that it has already succeeded at killing Windows Mobile, and it’s wondering what to do next, I’d suggest that pissing on its business partners in a ill-advised attempt to take down Apple would be a poor choice. It’s one of those things that sounds good on paper to Apple/AT&T haters, but it would be a really dumb move for Google. For one, it wouldn’t succeed. Google simply doesn’t have the product design sense nor the hardware/software experience to go head-to-head with Apple on merit. And for another, the iPhone already does a better job than any other mobile device at pushing out Google services to the masses.More people do Google searches on iPhones than they do on all Android phones combined. They also use Google Maps, Google Reader, Google Docs, etc. Google is supposed to throw all that away because Apple didn’t approve it’s Google Voice app? I don’t buy it.

Ars Technica has basically endorsed the Wall Street Journal theory I mentioned earlier today. One of my favorite lines:

A lot of people seem quite certain that Apple’s small-time purchase of a little Internet streaming company called Lala is going to fundamentally change the entire way Apple presents content to the user.

The latest to join the fray is the Wall Street Journal, which proposes that Apple will stop selling downloaded music altogether and instead just serve up tunes that you purchase over the web. So no need to carry your entire collection on the internal storage of your iPod touch. Just hook up to the web and stream any song you’ve bought the rights to.

That sounds great. Until you drive into a parking garage. Or to the beach. Or anywhere of a million places that doesn’t have an Internet connection. Do these people ever leave their offices?

The most important feature of any iPod is the ability to get non-stop music on the go, any time, anywhere. One of the best features of the iPhone, even, is that the iPod portion plays without ever skipping a beat, no matter which other applications you jump into or what happens to your internet connection. That lack of even the slightest interruption or stutter is essential to the experience.

What would people do on an airplane, with no stored music on their iPods? Pay for Wifi on the plane, just to listen to a few songs?

Time and time again, Apple’s research has shown that most people’s entire music collection fits comfortably on an 8GB iPod, let alone the 64GB that is available. People fill their iPods and iPhones with video and apps from the App Store, not music. Giving them the option to stream a couple of gigabytes of music isn’t going to help much.

Research has also shown that most songs on people’s iPods come from other sources, either stolen downloads or ripped CDs. A streaming service would do nothing for those songs, either.

Why would Apple, then, want to ditch what has worked so perfectly for years, only to substitute it with something as flaky as wireless Internet?

And why does every little purchase have to be a game-changing experience for Apple? Maybe Lala had some good technology Apple wanted to use to “augment” the iTunes experience. Maybe enough of Lala’s engineers were super-geniuses that it was cheaper to buy the company than just lure away its people with higher salaries. Maybe they just didn’t want Google or Microsoft to buy the company first. Who knows?

How about if Apple started by allowing you to download any song you’ve purchased more than once, so that if you accidentally delete a song or lose a hard drive to a crash, you can recover your purchased files easily. Audible has allowed this for years.

How about if Apple created some sort of Pandora-type service, which leveraged the Genius algorithms it already has plus Lala’s technology to create streamable playlists of recommended songs that you can listen to with the option to purchase and download with a simple click or tap? It would only work when you had a connection, so it wouldn’t be a substitute for your main library of songs, but as an added service, that might be cool.

We still don’t know the exact details of Apple’s purchase of PA Semiconductor several years ago. Chances are, we won’t know exactly what the Lala purchase was all about for a while, either. I won’t be holding my breath for a 0GB iPod Touch, though.