I'm around technology all day. I have a laptop, a PDA, several desktops, cameras and so on. But there are a few pieces of technology that empower me. My T-Mobile MDA empowers me the most. It gives me the ability to be connected just about anywhere.
1. I have mobile Internet. This allows me to check my email account via GMail, track my calendar with GCal, read my RSS feeds with Google Reader, visit web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. However a majority of web sites are not PDA friendly and are useless to view. This is also true for video. Trying to stream video is nearly impossible. Great services such as vTap are starting to change this.
2. My MDA has a built in MP3 player, Windows Media Player, that allows me to listen to all the music I want, and because I have a large storage card I can have dozens of songs available at all times. I can even watch videos, but I can't watch many because of quality issues. But this isn't really an issue for me because I don't watch a lot of video on my MDA.
3. The ability to stay in touch with my teenagers via SMS is invaluable.
4. View PDF and Office documents. One of the reasons I decided to go with an MDA instead of the Dash is the ability to edit Office documents. I spend a lot of time writing Word documents and tracking projects in Excel. It's nice to be able to use the file on my MDA and on my Laptop.
5. I've recently started storing more photos on my MDA. I used to have a whole bunch of pictures in my wallet, but it didn't seem as cool as being able to show more recent photos of the Family, events and just plain cool pics. So I took the photos out of my wallet and put them on the MDA.
There are more reasons my MDA empowers me. One I hope will give me even more utility is Skype. It's shaky on my MDA, but I know the technology will get better. This opens up a whole new world including mobile podcasting. Now if there was a mobile version of Audacity I wouldn't really need a computer any more.
Ironically, those of us in web video who've been preaching the "all-in-one-box" mantra for years were right after all... except for the part where your box doesn't play video all that well.
ReplyDeleteYet.
The other stumbling block here is that, even though we can continue to boil our technological lives down to one or two boxes, everyone's still going to have their own VERSIONS of those boxes. I somehow doubt we'll ever reach full standardization, nor should we. But I do wonder if the utopian (and minimalist) hope for a "one box" solution is a pipe dream for precisely these capitalist reasons...
Hey Justin,
ReplyDeleteI completely blame the device and not the content. I know the device wasn't designed around media so it lacks the ability. It will be nice when device manufactures start releasing a line of devices, i.e. iPhone, that take content into consideration.