I am currently on a month-long travel, about which I am keeping old-fashioned notes scribbled in pencil and I am hoping to upload them to this site with some photographs soon, and contrary to what I usually do, I left my laptop (MacBook) at home. It’s four-and-a-half years old, so in laptop years, rather ancient. The battery no longer works: it became fat, and terribly hot whenever I used it, so now it survives only when there is a power source nearby (see The ever-expanding MacBook battery). As such, it is not particularly mobile, but I use it basically as a desk-top computer, especially as one of its safety features, magsafe, gets unplugged therefore shuts down the computer so easily. But I have digressed.
Even though I’m not carrying my laptop, that doesn’t mean I’m without computing prowess. Smartphones are not mobile telephones with computing facilities, but to me they are computers with telephone function. The phone I have is Nexus One, which is a very good machine, and operates on Android. If I had a good Bluetooth keyboard, then I’d be pretty happy to use it as a computer, rather than a phone. Alas, my rather chubby fingers don’t do me any favours, and often I end up typing many letters at once, and it is much slower to type on the on-screen keyboard.
What I do like about the phone is that, having downloaded a number of apps, I can edit photographs, upload and download files, synchronize different folders, so it’s possible to post and update pages on this site if so I wish. I have done this with a few snapshots which doesn’t require much editing, however, but for writing entires like this one, I prefer to type on a desk-top or a laptop, which is what I am doing, using a friend’s computer.
In the future, it’s something like the current tablet, more portable than the laptop but with a larger screen than the smartphones, that will probably become the main form of gadget to access the internet, and most of the things we need will be in the cloud. Predicting the future is a foolish thing to do, but I’m excited about the prospect of a more mobile and more powerful ways to create and consume digital content.