PC, tablet, phone: use what works, or the plus-PC era

I'm carrying an extra device this week, juggling a PlayBook alongside my tablet PC, multiple smartphones, digital recorder and Exilim digital camera.

There's a lot of redundancy between those devices, and not just because I have more than one phone. The multiple phones are easiest to explain: there's my UK SIM with my standard number so I can get the text messages that warn me if my bank account balance is low because the bank holidays have disrupted money movement (though why the banks think we'll still believe that computers take the day off for the royal wedding, I don't know), there's the US phone with a US 3G radio for faster speed and there's both a BlackBerry and a Windows Phone because BlackBerry Messenger is an awesome way to communicate reliably and the battery lasts for days, but Windows Phone is hands down the best way to delete a lot of email quickly.

The digital recorder is in my pocket because it's part of my critical path; if I get an interesting interview I have to be able to record it without anything interfering with that or I can't do my job. Similarly, the Exilim earns its own pocket on my bag because the high-speed modes let me take good photographs in terrible light at higher resolution; of the smartphones today only the iPhone does in-camera HDR in a similar way but I like my 5x optical zoom and umpteen gigs of storage. I use the phone camera for snaps I want to share instantly, and for taking pictures as I take notes because on Windows Phone I can do that straight into OneNote and that's the information system I use.

The big advantage of OneNote for me is that I can take handwritten notes on my tablet PC walking around a show faster and more accurately than I can type on a phone, and it looks less like I'm ignoring the person I'm talking to. It's also handy to record time-synced audio with my notes and draw diagrams in my notes, it's been syncing seamlessly between PCs since Office 2003 and now I sync it onto my phone and the Web. Everyone chooses their own workflow and tools (or has it chosen for them at work) and they can tie you into technologies, so you always have to balance what you gain and what you give up - but if it wasn't OneNote there would be some other app or tool that was affecting my choices.

Because I chose OneNote and handwriting several years ago, these days I also have a tablet PC where I can touch the screen to click icons. This works because the HP EliteBook I carry has a high resolution touch digitiser - cheap touch screens make Windows impossible to use as a touch interface because you can't touch anything accurately, and even with the high resolution touch the Windows interface clearly doesn't have the touch-first design of tablets.

The PlayBook and the iPad and Honeycomb tablets do have touch-first interfaces; Media Center and the touch front ends several OEMs put on Windows 7 have (rarely as good) touch-first interfaces, but in almost every case there's a point where you fall down the rabbit hole back to the world where you need a mouse. On Windows it's when you run most apps: I can run the spell checker in OneNote faster with my finger than my mouse, but if I'm editing a photo in Paint.NET I use the trackpad. On pure tablets I still end up with times when I'm tapping a tiny icon with my finger - when I hit Web sites that expect me to be using a mouse. And when I have a 7" or 10" screen, I don't want the low-bandwidth, finger-friendly smartphone version of your Web site. I want the full-fat, full-function, video-stuffed site I'd see on my PC. Actually I want something that's just as rich and powerful that works with touch in a natural and intuitive way - but very few sites have invested in that level of touch support and I want the sites I already use, not the ones that happen to work better with fingers. (While I'm wishing for a pony, this would preferably not be plastered with ads and popups and popovers and popunders and poparounds, but that's the price we pay for free content - perhaps the demands of touch and intuitive use on tablets will rescue the paid apps and content subscriptions the Web has been disrupting? But I digress...)

Having a bigger screen doesn't just let me see more; it lets me do more complex things because I can see what's going on and as you get a larger screen on your device you start wanting more powerful software to use that real estate.

There are other interface and ergonomic issues to think about. I wouldn't use the PlayBook to write 5,000 essays. At this point, until RIM optimises the soft keyboard I wouldn't even pull it out to write this blog post (even in portrait mode, 7" is too large for anyone who doesn't have exceptionally large hands to type with both thumbs comfortably). I might write it on Windows Phone, because the touch keyboard and predictive correction is excellent; I would definitely write it on a BlackBerry keyboard, and yes, I can connect that to the PlayBook but if I have to find a place to balance the screen I might as well get out the PC. Reading an ebook or the report from yesterday's presentation of private members bills on the Hansard site; the PlayBook is perfect for that. Playing Tetris is pretty and fun on the PlayBook, but I get better gaming control with hardware buttons (the D-pad on older Windows Mobile devices was perfect for a high-speed game of Kevtris); but card games and driving games (tilt around corners) and anguished avian games are all nicer on a touch screen.

The real reason we'll have a plus-PC era rather than a post-PC era is that many people want to do a wide range of things and some of those work better with a keyboard, some work better with touch, some work better with something pocket sized, some need a bigger screen and all of them make you more productive or let you have more fun if you do them on the device where they work best rather than forcing them onto some other device because it happens to be in or out of fashion.

Mary Branscombe