The loadout, revisited

So I’m chilling in the cabin in Tahoe last weekend talking to some folks about technology, as you expect when a bunch of people who work in the Valley are on a weekend winter break. And one fellow says that he is considering going with an iPad mini (with LTE) and a cheap Nokia phone rather than a smartphone. And I am intrigued by this, because I can’t stop looking at the iPad mini for some reason, but there is the rather small problem of needing to wear a jacket or carry a bag everywhere if I’m packing a 7″ tablet (not to dismiss the fact that the 7″ obviates the need for a bag that the standard iPad requires).

And then tonight, it occurs to me: if I were to do that, I’d need the iPad mini (or Nexus 7), the Nokia 1112 (or the newer Nokia 105, just announced today and probably not ever coming to the US) – and an iPod nano or shuffle, because I have musical and podcast needs, and if I need to update the podcasts on the fly…and just like that, I’m back from three devices to one, which is the problem the iPhone was meant to solve for me in the first place.

The iPhone, in all honestly, was the final result of the better part of a decade of paring it down.  At one point in DC, I was carrying a pager, a cellphone, an iPod, and occasionally a Blackberry (in their pre-phone incarnation).  The pager and Blackberry were long gone as soon as I left DC, but I still had separate phone and music for three years – and needed a separate camera for anything serious with photos or video until mid-2010.  Now the idea that I need any separate camera is ridiculous, given that my iPhone 5 has a higher megapixel count than my wife’s digital camera and records higher-resolution video than our HD Flip. And in the meantime, the definition of a phone has evolved to the point where a smartphone is the default meaning – a phone that does nothing but place calls is an anachronism.

It’s interesting how things have progressed so much not just in my lifetime, but in the last fifteen years.  When I left Vanderbilt, a pager and an analog cellphone equalled the height of mobility communication. I didn’t get a phone that could handle email until 2000, and it was another year before I upgraded to one that could receive AND send text messages (inspired not a little by communication issues on September 11).  Then came a smartphone in 2003, a more plausible one in 2004, and then no more smartphones until the iPhone made them practical in terms of features and battery life and layered iPod functionality on that.

There’s sort of a millennial watershed, actually.  Start with my first laptop in 1999.  Within a year, I had a data-capable phone (the old Ericsson LX280 on the original AT&T wireless, doing CDPD at 9600bps) and early DSL, and by the end of 2000 it was sort of an article of faith that most anyone I knew would have a cellphone.  By 2002, Wi-Fi had entered the scene for me – present in Apple hardware for years beforehand but only truly large-scale by then, which coincidentally was about the same time that AT&T switched to GSM. And with “mMode” as a mainstream offering and the ability to get the laptop on the network away from home, “mobility computing” was finally a thing.

Meanwhile, musically, I bought my last cassette player (not even Walkman branded despite my intense Sony loyalty for such things since 1986) in late 1997 and my first portable MP3 player in 2000…then got my first iPod as a gift in 2002.  The last mix tape I ever assembled was in very early 1998, and the first MP3 I downloaded was at the end of that same year.  I relied on Audion until SoundJam was acquired and turned into iTunes, and when OS X 10.1 dropped, I went all in on iTunes and never looked back.

Despite my best efforts with a couple of smartphones and a couple more unlocked handsets (including the then-state-of-the-art V635) I couldn’t really make a cell phone work as a truly smart device.  The limitations of T9, a proxy browser, and a screen that rarely got bigger than 220×176 were just too much to overcome. So my next big leap came with the iPhone, which finally gave me a usable device that had email AND a plausible browser AND the ability to use Wi-Fi to get faster data than mere EDGE could offer. Within a couple of years, the default device is a smartphone that has email and web access and Wi-Fi and a video camera to boot, and the game has shifted again.

In the meantime, the netbook appears around 2008 as a cheap-and-cheerful option for mainstream computing, and works well for a couple of years – until the iPad comes along and eats its lunch on performance and battery life.  All of a sudden here’s a device that lets you do 90% of what a laptop does, with legit 10 hour battery life and the option for 3G cellular so you can really go anywhere – and by 2011 with the rise of LTE, the curve is shifting on mobility computing.

Ironically, I have my own separate loadout for shutdown nights now – I have the MOTOFONE F3, which was basically already ten years obsolete when I got it as a gift five years ago. But it’s a basic lifeline, not a means of constant connectivity.  Then there’s the Kindle 3G, which is perfect for reading but whose universal wireless capability is only viable as a browser of absolute last resort.  Throw a $40 iPod shuffle on there for going to the gym or a run or whatever and you have the basics of modern technological convenience without actually being connected to much of anything – a slimmed down black-and-white version of what I described back there at the beginning.  Ultimately, that’s the loadout going back to the very beginning: a means of communication, something to read, and background music.  Back in college it was a rolled-up magazine or two, a Walkman, and a quarter for the pay phone to call the answering machine that would only pick up after two rings if you had messages to retrieve.  Now nobody even bothers to leave voicemail, for the most part.

Meanwhile, the daily carry in all circumstances is down to keys, handkerchief, pen, wallet and iPhone. And that’s basically it.  This is why the battery life of the iPhone is more important than ever (and why I have a separate dedicated charging cable at my desk at work) – it’s carrying the load for all three functions above. Even if reading means RSS and Twitter more than magazines – but make no mistake, they only get read on the electronic devices.  And that’s why the iPhone always wins: because in the end, it means I only have to carry one thing.

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