The Week With Just An iPhone: Unproductive But Fun

November 28th, 2009

Back from a trip where I tried to make do with just an iPhone for an entire week; some observations:

The Good

• Entertainment: I played tons of games, especially during the plane rides. I got in a marathon Arcade Bowling competition with my brother, played all the way through Ravensword, and made heavy use of Crosswords.
• Email: Always nice to know what you can put off to another day.
• Twitter: Tweetie rocks.
• iPod: music, movies, and TV shows. Note: you can fit the entire discography of the Beatles and ABBA, plus the Mad Men season finale on one 8GB iPhone.
• News: CNN, Time Magazine, Bloomberg, etc. No more stack of magazines for the plane ride.
• Maps: The GPS and maps prove invaluable when cluelessly wandering in an unfamiliar place — the definition of tourism.
• “Airplane Mode,” and adjusting time on location (Settings -> General -> Date & Time -> Set Automatically).

The Bad

• The WordPress iPhone app works okay for blogging, but doesn’t let you edit the “excerpt” field, isn’t that great at creating links, and lists scheduled posts first (this is a problem in my case, since I have a ton of movie reviews set to publish in the future). Using the iPhone keyboard also isn’t much fun to type long paragraphs on.
• The iPhone’s short battery life kept becoming a hassle, and a car charger is no use when you’re walking around. Several times the iPhone died in the middle of the day. Might need to get one of those battery packs.
• Using Safari for more complex (productive) tasks like checking bank accounts or online travel reservations felt cramped.

Conclusion

Although the iPhone is excellent at providing mobile entertainment, the MacBook will have to come along for future trips if I need to get any actual work done. But the ideal vacation means getting away from work, and making do with just an iPhone may be a good way to limit oneself to just the fun stuff.