“How many computers do you need?”

Tags: Design,  Devices,  Theory
June 17, 2009 by Steven

After lunch at the Paleteria, and buying tomato plants, Alison and a friend decide to give up from the unpleasant Kansas City heat and spend the afternoon in the house. I am working away in the office here, and mostly ignoring them but then comes the phrase “How many computers do you need?” from Alison’s office.

We’re a little extreme, yes. There are…five working, running, computers in the house? I think. I might be missing one. Alison’s laptop, while in her office, lives on top of an /entirely other/ working laptop. So it looks pretty needlessly extravagant.

I respond, “Well I’m using three right now.” So they wander in, and I explain that I’m not cheating. The desktop is two monitors, but that’s just one computer. And really, I am hardly using it but to type, point and look at.

Aside from the stuff in the cloud, every document I am working on is coming from this window (which I can’t show you as it’s all secret client stuff), which is files off on the work laptop propped up in the living room.

Okay, that’s two. And the third is my mobile handset.

“No, that’s a phone.”

She, essentially, says that she knows it’s complex and microprocessor controlled, but it’s not a computer, it’s a phone. That’s why it’s called a /phone/.

Ah, ha. But besides the fact I have made maybe one voice call on it today (and have no wireline phone, so no cheating here), it’s a computer. I have SMS’d back and forth a dozen times today. I email or use the (well-synched) calendar alarms to keep on schedule even when I go eat lunch or have to persuade the dog to come inside because the lawn guy is here to spray.

I have a perfectly functional office suite, a PDF viewer arguably better than some desktop ones, can synch a Bluetooth keyboard for speedier input, and routinely plug it into the projector for meetings at work. Quality is mediocre, but we’re half a step from being able to dock and use it as a desktop computer replacement for every work task that is not about actually drawing interfaces.

I can even make it look exactly like the other computer here at home, and I open up the file system for the handset right on my computer desktop. I can, and do, trade files back and forth just like the laptop. And when I am playing with or testing UI, I’ll load graphics and take screenshots on and off it constantly. It actually /is/ being used essentially just like the laptop right now.

I spend a lot of time here saying crazy things like “mobiles are little computers” but amongst ourselves it’s easy. Getting called on it from others is interesting, and made me look at it somewhat differently, and maybe believe it a little more than I consciously had before. I’m not sure Alison’s friend is convinced just yet, though.


«« on scrolling in mobiles  |  how many webs? »»

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture.
Anti-Spam Image