Unimaginable - Ditching the Smartphone
Posted by TFG on February 16th, 2007
After 13 long years with a PDA of some form or fashion, I’m excusing myself from the synchronization wars and going back to an old-school paper planner from Franklin-Covey.
Almost…I’m still going to sync my Contacts, somehow, to one of those Motorola Razr phones. I can’t live without my Contacts. Crikey — I fancy myself a salesman, and what’s a salesman without a list of leads?
But, over the years, and especially the last two years with a Treo 600p and a 700p, I’ve come to the realization that I’m wasting monumental amounts of time and energy and money trying to hold it all together with bailing wire and chewing gum and a slew of unneeded, extraneous highly technological horseapples. It might be different if I felt Palm was doing more to advance the form, but sadly, they’re not and I don’t think they will. The rewards are just too small.
In parting, I will say this — those things are simply wonderful marvels of pure engineering genius. But the shrinking of the laptop, the ubiquity of the Wireless Web, and some sharply delineated, ruthlessly formulated ideas of what I really and truly need brings an end* to a long and fruitful partnership.
* Temporary end? We’ll see. I’m not throwing the 700p out, or giving it away. You think I’m crazy? I’ve still got a Palm V around here somewhere. And all the coolest accessories for it that make me slap my forehead now…like a snap-on modem. Yeesh.
February 16th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
I’m planning to replace my (dumb as I can get right now) phone and my iPod with an iPhone in June, and I am hoping against hope that I will be able to get the company here to set it up to accept push-mail from our servers, which would mean that I can ditch my blackberry too. I like doo-dads like smartphones get, but I love having a device that actually works more.
February 16th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Hmmm… didn’t we have this discussion recently? I just threw away my old Palm V since everything I used it for fit on my cellphone now.
February 16th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
I don’t have a cell phone. Should I turn myself into the authorities, or can people like me get off with a special tattoo?
February 17th, 2007 at 8:51 am
You’ll be our natural leader when the end comes, Andrea.
February 17th, 2007 at 10:06 am
That must be a rather special tattoo.
February 19th, 2007 at 11:08 am
The down side to the iphone is that, being a product of Jobs, it doesn’t play well with Exchange, no expandable memory, no 3G, and no removable battery. Apple had the perfect opportunity to corner the smart phone market and really screwed the pooch with this one.