Smartphones: Making people dumber since 1992

There are some great upsides to being back on the market. I've been consuming content non-stop for the last three weeks in an attempt to get reacquainted with the latest tech trends. When you're busy working, often 'sharpening the saw' has to take a backseat to the realities of work. Over the last two weeks I've started playing with new techs, started reading about different management theories, lots of other interesting articles (intermingled with a unhealthy dose of Dragon Age: Origins).

At some point you realize you want to give back to the internet community rather than just be a consumer and hence I've decided to start blogging again.

It has been a while since I've posted so lets start with something lightweight. Like my Android!

I decided to leave the stone age and join the portable computing age with an new smartphone. I purchased the HTC Magic from Vodafone. I won't give you reviews about all the specs, how fast or pretty the phone is, you can get these from Engadget or Giz or any number of other bloggers. No, I want to talk about a few other things.

The Work Stuff

What I found interesting is how most of my use cases for getting a laptop disappeared when I got this smartphone. Here are the primary use cases I had for getting an laptop:

• Able to answer email anywhere: Answering email on the go using gmail is straightforward and fun.
• Write documents: It turned out I never wanted to write 'documents' on the go, but the ability to capture ideas in bullet form. In a sense I can actually produce more content because I'm only concerned with ideas, not structure and presentation, which are activities much better suited to my large monitor.
• Have access to various applications: Turned out most of those apps are available on a smartphone anyway. Train timetables, twitter, IM Clients, PasswordSafe and the list goes on.

The Fun Stuff

Being a well known gaming extraordinare, you were probably thinking, why isn't gaming on the go up there? Despite the giant portable games market, I never had any interest in this, so the somewhat sluggish HTC Magic's CPU never caused me a problem. That is not to say I have no interest in media at all.

• Videos - the HTC only plays MP4, 3GP and Youtube. No support for flash like most smartphones which actually doesn't bother you as much as you think. The MP4 HAS to be downloaded at the correct resolution (320x480) for the phone otherwise it has to rescale and on the QualComm processor, this just results in slow, jerky video. But get something made for that resolution, like the TED Talks podcast and its just beautiful. Tip: Get a different video player from the Android Market than the inbuilt one though.
• Music - Things that drive me crazy #133. Hearing a song, not knowing what it is and forgetting the lyrics for Googling later. Enter the well known app Shazam. Second problem, not knowing the words for singing along. Enter TuneWiki. Unfortunately they are different apps. If only they'd mate and produce a beautiful baby application. But otherwise this is perfect. If only the android had iTunes like integration for my songlists however. Oh well, can't win everything.

What I found fascinating are the behavioural changes.

• I used to try to memorize prices when shopping and inevitably fail. Now I simply capture them using photos and look it up when I go home. I've recently got a Barcode Scanner/Google Shopper app which I've yet to try out.
• Disregard for checking before leaving - Previously, if you have an engagement, I'd look up where, find it on Gmaps, confirm the time and so on. Now I just leave and figure it out as I go. There is always moments on the train or at red lights where you can check everything online.
• There is no such thing as loneliness. The long 1 hour commute on the train after a night out is an furious IM texting session with people using GTalk or Ebuddy (for MSN/FB). I've also been practicing ignoring the notifications from the phone to overcome the urge to consume whatever email, facebook message or tweet. I can't believe there isn't an free app to disable notifications at night yet however. Hopefully with time...

Whilst I still hold true to what I said before in that you can survive on phone calls and text alone, this is like saying you can survive on dialup alone when you have broadband. You can, but you're just SO much less effective that moving back to that previous model is crippling.