There Are Limitations With Smartphones

Like a lot of business people, I took some time off last week before the return of school and the regular grind back to work. I thought I did something very clever by promising not to take my laptop along and to rely on my smartphone to do business. To my surprise, I wasn’t that impressed with what I could actually do business-wise. With about 200 million smartphones in the market, it’s almost heresy to say that there are limitations with them. So I’ll tread lightly on why there are limitations- and it’s not all the fault of the manufacturers.

I mentioned in an earlier blog- and I certainly stand by it now- that the smartphone will not ‘kill’ the pc market for a number of reasons:

• It’s still difficult to work with Word and Excel documents on smartphones. I couldn’t easily open the attachments. I decided to wait till my return to access these on my laptop to take a good look at the content and make any corrections or updates.
• Following this point, the screen is too small- it was hard sometimes to get a real handle on email content (my hereiam™ text to voice helped me here).
• Interacting with businesses on websites was almost impossible. I did see some sites that were mobile friendly, but not a lot. Surfing the web is still grueling (it’s getting better, especially with Safari, but for non iPhone users, it’s still slow).
• There are thousands of applications available but it’s also very confusing. And there are very few integrated apps that give you multiple capabilities (again hereiam™ helped me here).
• Before my vacation, I realized that unless you are given a smart phone as part of your job, you almost need a degree in “Unbundling Confusion” to understand what is being offered by the carriers. At one time I thought a Samsung slider would be perfect for my needs until I was told that it only supported texting i.e. SMS- no email, no data plan (it’s a carrier thing, not the manufacturer).
• When I went to the States, I turned my smartphone off. The roaming rates are ridiculous and I didn’t want the pain of confronting my mobile bill with exorbitant charges.

Did you know that the computing power of today’s smartphones is multiple times more powerful than the computers used to land the first spaceship on the moon? It’s an incredible achievement. Unfortunately, you can still get frustrated with what’s actually available for business. I nearly hugged my laptop when I got home (ok, maybe not). But my little vacation away did reinforce for me the fact that there are business tools for doing specific parts of business and one is not a panacea for all things.