Give Me A Laptop, A Simple Phone And Paper V1.0
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: who, needs, technology, anyway
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Give Me A Laptop, A Simple Phone And Paper V1.0
2. Give Me A Laptop, A Simple Phone And Paper V1.0
After becoming jaded by all this technology in my life, nowadays I carry one briefcase with me wherever I go. It contains one laptop, plus spare battery, one simple but robust phone, one USB memory key, one pen and a pad full of Paper v1.0.
Outlook and my phone act as my calendar, and I alternate between the two and some paper to organise everything I've got to do. I write using the laptop or the pen and paper. I send email via the laptop and thank my good graces when I can get away from the damn Inbox; though my trusty phone can act as a modem if I really, really (really, really, really...) need it and happen to be miles from any Wi-Fi hotspots or plug-in points.
Sure I'm missing out on the ability to simply push said email to my phone, but then I would have two places to manage my Inbox - on my laptop, and in my phone. That doesn't quite double the workload of maintaining it all, but it doesn't half it either; that's for sure.
What are the advantages of my extraneous technology shunning system? I have a mobile that won't run out of battery at the first sign of a back-lighted LCD or shoddy onboard camera. I don't have to carry around any extra weight and I don't have to worry about synching everything up to the laptop which I take with me everywhere anyways.
Oh yes, I don't spend my entire salary chasing the organization carrot. And have you ever seen paper blue screen? Burn perhaps, but at least you know where you stand with fire as opposed to the ever murky registry.
The final straw comes with the fact that there remain things that only a laptop can do - there are many things a laptop can do better than a PDA which measures its number crunching abilities in MHz, but more importantly there are things that only a notebook, with its GHz crunching powers, can do. So why, pray tell, would I want to haul around a notebook AND a PDA/smartphone combination?
I'm not willing to shell out for and carry around two or three items, all of which essentially do the same job, have to be coordinated and only one of which (the laptop) can fulfil all my needs in the same package.
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