Can you get by for a week with just an iPhone?

Blogger: Anne Thomas Manes

I conducted an interesting experiment last week. The Burton Group analyst and consulting teams convened in Salt Lake City (our headquarters) for our annual planning meeting. My laptop was sick, so I took the opportunity to hand it over to our IT team to rebuild it for me while I was in town. That left me with nothing more than my iPhone for four days.

We have a "no gizmos" rule at our planning meetings, so I had no compelling reason to have a full computer system with me -- I took notes on paper. My primary computer requirement for the week was to answer the occasional email -- but since the whole team was in town, my needs were fairly limited.

And I managed pretty well with just the iPhone. I did need to borrow a friend's laptop twice. The first time I needed to send an email containing a URL -- I really hate the fact that the iPhone doesn't have a copy/paste feature. The second time I needed to send a calendar invitation. Although I can create calendar events and accept/decline invitations, the iPhone doesn't allow me to send invitations. Other major limitations of the iPhone include lack of the VPN client I need to access our SharePoint site, and limitations associated with reading Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. But I anticipate that I will be able to leave my laptop home on a lot of my shorter business trips.

Comments

[Sandy Kemsley]

You can email a URL by navigating to the page, then select the bookmark menu (the + key) and select "Mail link to this page".