What Happens When You Forget Your Laptop?

Many people have long talked about the day when desktops and laptops will no longer exist. When you think about it, there is really nothing that couldn’t be done on your cell phone that can be done on a desktop or laptop.

Sure there are some applications that haven’t yet been made available on a cell phone (I mean natively. Of course a remote desktop environment can run anything) yet. However, every application could be made available on a cell phone if desired. The cell phone is powerful enough. Especially when attached to a powerful server. Yes, I know that many of the mobile apps aren’t as great as their desktop counterparts, but they could and will be.

If we could just use our cell phone for these applications, why don’t we? It admins would happily get rid of desktops and laptops in order to have a much smaller device footprint that they have to manage. It would take some time to make the switch, but it would happen.

The biggest reason I think we have yet to go all in with cell phones as our primary device is the value of peripherals. I think we seriously underestimate the value of a decent keyboard and extra screen real estate.

I’m amazed at how well you can type on a cell phone keyboard, but it still pales in comparison to a quality keyboard. Voice recognition might help in some situations, but it can’t be used everywhere a keyboard can be used. I don’t see us ever beating a physical keyboard at least until it starts typing our thoughts.

Screen real estate is an even bigger issue. As much as you shrink the internals of a cell phone you’re still bound by the size of the screen. Just look at Apple’s choice to release an iPhone with a larger screen. We love as much screen space as we can get. If you’ve never had the delight of using dual monitors on your desktop, you have no idea the efficiencies you’re missing out on. I can do everything on my laptop that I can do on my desktop, but dual monitors makes doing so much more effecient. I even bought a second monitor I could plug into the USB on my laptop. It’s that valuable.

I think the clear solution to this problem is to be able to easily connect your cell phone to external “monitors” and other peripherals like keyboards. Soon these connections will all be available wirelessly. I put “monitors” in quotes since I think we’ll have electronic viewing areas on everything from windows to tables and everything in between. That’s an exciting future to consider (we’ll leave the security issues for another post).

Unfortunately, we’re not there yet, but I think it’s where we’re headed. Eventually we’ll sit down at our desk where our cell phone will wirelessly connect to the monitors and peripherals on your desk. Until then we do this awkward dance between cell phone, laptop and desktop.

In fact, I just boarded a flight with my laptop charging at home instead of being in my laptop bag. Now I get to see first hand the difference between my laptop and cell phone on a work trip. If only the seat back was a monitor and the tray table a keyboard I could connect to my cell phone. Then, I’d been in business and wouldn’t even need my laptop. One day!

Afterthought: This is definitely a first world problems” post. Also, excuse any typoes, because I wrote this post in air on my cell phone keyboard. Certainly the lack of keyboard and monitor didn’t stop me from doing this post, but I could have probably done it twice as fast. Although, it’s a bit ironic that this post wouldn’t exist if the tech was already available. If you’ll be at the Insite Build conference in Fargo, ND, we’ll see you there. Just don’t be surprised if I ask to borrow your laptop.