For many people, the answer is all three. The phone is for answering calls, checking email, and sneaking Angry Birds; the tablet is for streaming videos; and the laptop is for all things truly work. But will lugging around a computer always be necessary?
Mobile Productivity: an Oxymoron?
In a recent Forrester survey, 24 percent of those who had recently purchased a tablet said they do not plan to buy new PCs anytime soon. An IDC research survey released last month bears this out: In the first quarter of 2013, PC shipments were down almost 14 percent compared with the same quarter in 2012.
"For Web browsing, light email, and most media-consumption activities, such as playing games, watching videos, reading ebooks, and listening to music, mobile devices are quickly becoming the preferred device," says Tony Costa, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research. And when it comes to work, a sales analyst who needs only to look up charts before he or she meets with a client, or someone using a phone to get directions to a delivery address, smartphones are more than enough already.
The real issue, then, is for people who need intensive computing power, advanced features, or traditional office software to do their day-to-day jobs. You can use Google Docs or Apple's Pages app on an iPad, type short memos, and answer a few emails. Physical keyboards help, but it's awkward to treat a tablet placed upright as a touchscreen.
Rob Enderle, a consumer analyst with Enderle Group, says, "Limitations in the power and screen of the smaller device, and bandwidth limits on cloud services, are keeping the full functionality closer to hard-wired large-screen devices." Translation: Gadgets are optimized for the task at hand. The big screen at work is best for use with a keyboard and mouse; the phone, with its small keyboard, is better suited for tapping text messages to friends. What could help? Gadgets that offer legitimate productivity accessories, apps, and some extra innovations.
Accessories
One of the most glaring examples of this problem is the Microsoft Surface tablet. Microsoft offers two different keyboards, one that works like a cover and has flat, nonraised keys, and another that has slightly more bulbous keys. Both are lousy options if you plan to sit at a coffee shop all day?expect to be frustrated by constant keyboard errors and typing snafus. Frankly, there's nothing quite like having a full chiclet keyboard like the one on the Google Chromebook Pixel.
A simple way to make your mobile device more work-friendly is through add-ons. I've tried this myself on countless business trips. Belkin just released the Ultimate Keyboard Case for iPad ($40), and Kensington, iLuv, and many others make external Bluetooth keyboards that connect to mobile devices wirelessly. What I found: You can type for a while and even get some work done. But for long-haul sessions (say, 8 hours) they just don't provide enough accuracy. So far, a favorite is the Arc Keyboard by Microsoft ($59), which lets me type quickly and accurately.
Then there's the mouse. For precision work, nothing beats this input device, invented way back in the '70s. "Touch is nice, but when I have to do real work, the old standbys"?keyboard and mouse?"work better for me," Enderle says. Right now, touch interfaces are helpful sometimes, but certainly not always.
Productivity Apps to the Rescue
While hardware remains a problem, business software for mobile devices is coming around. In a recent demonstration, for example, Adobe Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty showed how this photo-editing and workflow production app could work on an iPad. The user interacts with images entirely through touch, navigating a simplified version of the software and working with smaller-size files stored locally. The app syncs your changes to the full-res files on the cloud. Adobe's main goal is to prepare for the age of mobile productivity: everything in the cloud, with access at your fingertips, and users paying a subscription fee rather than owning software. You can't edit a real photo using Photoshop on an iPad today, but someday you will.
In a similar move toward full functionality on tablets, Intuit just released an iPad version of its accounting program Quickbooks a few weeks ago. The app lets you do real business accounting by selecting touchscreen options to create invoices and generate business reports.
For photo manipulation, iPhoto on the iPad is arguably just as fully functional and powerful as the desktop equivalent. You can load massive photos in from the cloud (say, from Dropbox or the Apple iCloud service) and view them on the 2048 x 1536?pixel screen. The tablet version of the software also lets you apply complex filters to make brightness and luminosity adjustments using touch sliders. Most importantly, it handles the workflow: importing images, editing them, and exporting back to the cloud.
Future Features
The most important innovation for mobile productivity might be speech technology. Apps such as Ask Ziggy and Siri already handle spoken requests like "find me a hotel in San Francisco" or "remind me to call my wife in the morning," and there are programs such as Nuance that let users dictate entire documents by voice. These kinds of programs have been around for years, but have improved greatly of late and require little training.
What's next? For starters, more intelligent speech-recognition systems could understand your intent. You could say to an photo-editing app something like, "Make my image a little brighter and match my favorite shot from last week" and the app would understand what you really mean. For a text document running on your tablet, you could say something like, "Find all of my typos" and an app would walk you through corrections.
Gesture technology, like that on the Samsung Galaxy S4, is coming too. You won't have to physically touch input devices?screens, keyboards, mice?to tell gadgets to do things.
The laptop and the desktop will die a painful death someday. It might not be for two more decades, but technology will become more of an enabler than ever before. We'll all become more productive in this digital realm, not just at a staid office desk or cubicle. As Enderle told me, we'll get there eventually. "This is more of an evolution than a revolt."
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