SnapStream Blog (staging)

Well, on a different note, I got a cell phone the other day.

I’m guessing that for most of you, cell phones are old news, but for me, they’re new and interesting. I’m sure some of you are wondering, how does anyone live without a cell phone nowadays?

Actually, I’ve gone without a cell phone for a long time and done just fine, thank you. You see, I prefer to work in stretches without any interruptions, and cell phones, by their very nature, make that somewhat difficult. If you take some time to read productivity literature, you’ll see a lot about how it takes 15 minutes to resume flow after it’s been broken, and how all the constant interruptions are probably making us, as a society, less productive, not more productive.

Despite that little bit of philosophizing, I finally decided to get one. What’s changed? Despite the risk of constant interruption, I have simply decided that I will see if becomes a problem and manage appropriately if it does by turning off the phone or asking people not to call me at particular times unless it’s urgent. Of course, there are definitely the usual advantages to owning a phone that have nothing to do with work, such as being able to sync up with buddies when you’re heading somewhere, grabbing lunch, or whatever. And, on top of that, the availability of reasonably priced unlimited Internet access built into the phone is something that simply wasn’t around the last time I messed with mobile phones. The Internet is…well, it’s the Internet. Omnipresent access to that is a big deal.

OK, that’s the phone angle. Phone good, but interruption bad. Let’s come at this from another angle.

One thing that I *have* been carrying around for a long time is a PDA. A trusty old Palm III, no less. It’s probably a good 5 or 6 years old now. I carried it around with my notes and contacts everywhere. For all of the time that I owned it, I never felt a real solid urge to upgrade from it to a newer Palm or Pocket PC. And it all boiled down to one thing. Can you guess what that thing was?

Battery life.

The Palm III lasts a few months on a set of AA batteries and as an organizer, it does its job exceedingly well. One thing I try very hard to do is minimize the amount of crap I have to deal with on a daily basis. Recharging something daily, by that standard, is a very big offender.

The history of the PDA is pretty interesting. I’m now going to do it a vast injustice by summing it up in a few sentences.

There were initially several abortive attempts at PDA’s, most notably the Newton. But then, something different came along. The original Pilot was the first product that proved PDA’s actually could work…excellent battery life, great character recognition that was enabled by training the user to write using the “Graffiti” system, and built in PIM applications that did everything you needed to do to replace your standard planner.

Fast forward to today. The evolution of the PDA, sadly enough, has been mostly about shoving more and more power into the same package at the expense of battery life. Can you point to a current PDA that lasts for months on a single set of batteries right now? Because I can’t.

Interestingly enough, I actually owned a Newton for about a month, but the fact that it was large enough to require me to carry it around in some sort of purse like enclosure killed off my enthusiasm for the product.

Alright, now we’re getting somewhere. Basically, I knew that whatever I got would have to replace both my current PDA as well as serve as my phone, because I definitely was not going to carry both of those things around. I already hated the idea of having to plug in yet another piece of technology every day…but if I was going to do it, by golly it had better at the very least get rid of something else I was carrying around, or either PDA or the phone would certainly fall into a state of disuse.

Plus I don’t have enough pockets to add one more gadget to the mix. No, I’m not going to start wearing parachute pants.

Well, we’ve established that I needed a PDA phone. Next entry, I’ll talk about how I started looking for what to buy.

P.S. In case you’re wondering why I’m writing about phones on a SnapStream blog, there’s a number of reasons. One, there’s a high likelihood that you, the reader, is a techie like the rest of us here at SnapStream. I don’t see any reason not to talk about the common threads of life we encounter. Two, you’ll get some insights into how I think and how that influences the direction that our software takes (and possibly, I like to think, why we win the occasional award or two).

Richard Kuo
Chief Technology Officer

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 17th, 2005 at 11:59 pm by rkuo and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.