Windows Mobile Editor Anthony Newman decides that it's a hard knock life for a road warrior.
It's not easy working on the go. One can be happily sitting on the plane, tapping away at the screen of a connected handheld or maybe playing a game on a smartphone. The radio module is off, of course, but how does the cabin crew know that? Once they've forced you to turn the rest of the device off, more importantly, how can you possibly get anything done? Such are the perils of putting all of one's eggs in a single digital basket, but there are other problems for mobile users, too.
Since you can't use your own data provider on the plane, even if roaming, the airlines have users over a barrel when it comes to communications conduits. Data provision on airlines, on the rare occasion when it is available, is prohibitively expensive, meaning that all but the most important executives will simply have to wait until they land to check their email. In our connected world, with hotspots popping up everywhere, this comes as an increasing shock for us techno-junkies.
Unless you have the luxury of travelling by business class, road warriors face issues of space, too: airline seats aren't designed for juggling devices, especially with accessories. Security is an increasing bone of contention now, with security guards suspicious of PDAs and other dubious technical gear. The most crucial issue, though, is that of power - standard sockets are hard to come by on aeroplanes, unfortunately. Even if power doesn't prove an issue, the very nature of working with a mobile device can ruin productivity.
We've ranted in the past about data input, of course, and also the immaturity of handheld applications: this can result in inability to create desktop-format documents, or to open attachments while on the go. Obviously, different platforms suffer from this problem in different ways, but they all share an even greater problem: what to do with the file once it's been created.
Think about it - you haven't brought your desktop, so syncing it to a more mature system is impossible. Your colleagues are using desktops, or laptops without IR ports, so you can't beam it. Of course, the majority of PCs don't come with SD or CF slots, meaning you can't just transfer it on a memory card. You're abroad, so the cost of emailing the attachment via GPRS roaming means it would be more efficient to re-create it from scratch on the other machine. Bluetooth-beaming offers a potential solution, but the desktop uptake of the wirefree standard still isn't good enough. What is a mobile worker to do?
Answers on a postcard, please - and try to make them from somewhere exotic: it's cold over here.
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