Since writing about The Tablet / iPad I have been bouncing around some ideas on how my behaviour would change by trying to replace my MacBook Pro with the iPad. One avenue of thought is how mobile phone interactions evolve when all these devices are part of the web.
One of the most important details is that like the iPhone the iPad will run one application at a time – many people see this as a fatal flaw but I see it as a potentially quite positive constraint. People talk about the inefficiency of multitasking and how single-tasking is the way to go, but most of us still go on to run 20 applications at once on our computers!
But what about using multiple single-task devices, like we used to? You will rarely be carrying around just the iPad by itself, as Steve Wozniak touches on in a recent interview:
Q: What’s your favorite phone?
A: The iPhone, because of the apps. By the way, I solved the problem of battery life and [the lack of] multitasking on the iPhone.
Q: Really?
A: Yeah. I just have two iPhones, so if the battery runs down on the first one, I can use the other. And if I’m talking on one, I can use the other one to look something up. You would not believe how much use I get out of that.
You are always going to have your iPhone with you when using your iPad, and it is already a phone but then you add in the Facebook app, the Skype app, the Twitter app, and it becomes the natural communications device. This is how I have been using it recently and it works really well. Anthony Volodkin from Hype Machine has a similar experience:
“One interesting way I started dealing with this is that I don’t have email open on my computer, but I keep my iPhone on my desk, glance at the phone to see what kind of emails I have. Because it’s a phone, your brain processes it in a different way, so, for whatever reason, it’s not as distracting. I’ll pick up the phone to make sure that it doesn’t have any of those 5% ones.”
The underlying technology that makes this sort of setup possible is realtime cloudification – ensuring that any change I make on one device is instantly replicated all over the web to all of my other devices. This shift has been coming for a long time and in the communications space it is finally here.
Have you tried using your phone as your main communications device?
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