Road Trip: iPhone Wins
Over the weekend my wife and I took a short road trip down to Los Angeles. At the last minute, I made an impulsive choice to leave my MacBook behind: personally, a big step since it’s been a constant companion during essentially every trip.
But after a mere day into the journey, I decided my worries were for naught. The iPhone proved to be a capable laptop replacement and actually better in a few ways.
The Good
- The iPhone’s ever-present Internet connectivity worked awesome the entire time. Outside of the Bay Area proper, I had few reception problems. The only moment of zero bars was in the Getty Musuem parking garage — understandable since it’s several levels below ground.
- The iPhone’s maps and GPS proved invaluable navigating the nutty Los Angeles freeways, for calculating distance to destinations and measuring traveling time.
- Used Google search a few times to find locations and even hotel availability.
- Could check email and Twitter to keep up on both work and news.
- iPhone photos have GPS information, so once imported into iPhoto, creates a pretty cool progress trail on a map.
- Much smaller and lighter than a laptop.
The Bad
- Battery life. The iPhone was completely drained after the first leg of driving, forcing us to buy an iPhone car charger.
- The iPhone keyboard still feels prohibitive for writing long amounts of text, so updating this blog was out of the question.
Conclusion
Despite my inability to update the blog (which was actually a good thing if you ask the better half), I plan to leave the MacBook home on future trips. And I now understand folks saying the iPhone is essentially, Apple’s netbook.
After the first paragraph, I thought this post was going to be about disconnecting from everything and doing a road trip to the big city (I skipped the post title). Ha, glad to be wrong.
Can’t wait to get an iPod Touch / iPhone, this is exactly what I’d use it for.
Heh, yeah, I should someday do a complete unplug vacation (say go camping) but one would need an extra day to deal with incapacitation due to the shakes.
Ha, yes — it would have to be several days, just to get acclimated.
It’s good to know that iPhone still enables you to do the work that’s supposed to be done with your Macbook.
[…] And even on the iPhone – which isn’t a computer – it’s the same story. I can’t give up the apps. And then add in the iPhone’s iPod functions, playing back all the music and video stored on it. The iPhone is important to consider because it’s essentially my “netbook.” I’ve given up wanting a netbook because as far as mobile computing goes, the iPhone more than suffices. […]