E-mail on the Phone

I love being able to check my e-mail on my smartphone. It is very handy and useful when I am out and about. I can instantly check to see if there are any important messages that need attention while at the grocery store or even at Disneyland. However I much prefer to do e-mail on my laptop or desktop computer. There is something nice about being able to type on a full-size keyboard.

My day was spent in a very important meeting with other parts of my company and it was nice to have my laptop that I could pull out to read e-mail. Sure I could have used my phone but since I had my laptop, I used it. One of my colleagues from New York wasn't so lucky. Her Windows laptop inexplicably died and so she was stuck using her phone. At lunch she turned her laptop into our IT department and they started working on it. At the end of the day I found her wandering around trying to find our IT department so she could pick it back up. I walked with her to their lab and we found the guys still trying to bring her computer back from the dead. Unfortunately they were not done.

My colleague was happy that they were helping her and she told them that she would just try and use her phone to deal with the 225 or so unread e-mail messages. They worked some magic and gave her a loaner laptop complete with her e-mail loaded onto it. She was so happy not to be relegated to her tiny on-screen keyboard for the evening. I have to say I was happy our IT department could set her up with a loaner laptop so quickly. After all, 10 e-mail messages is about my limit on a phone, then I run the risk of destroying it out of frustration.

A Laptop is Not a Tablet

My son was able to solve a number of his problems with Windows 8 today. It turns out that the designers at Microsoft want their users to have the same experience on laptops, tablets, and phones. What a stupid idea. Hopefully Apple never stoops to such a moronic idea.

I thought touchscreens were really cool when they first came out. That lasted about 10 minutes. After that, my screen became so covered with fingerprints and body oils that I came to my senses and realized a mouse or touch pad is a much better interface. Sony figured that out with their PlayStation Vita. In addition to having a touchscreen, the back of the Vita works as a touch pad. Why? They realized that if your finger is on the screen, you might be missing something taking place in the game. Not having your fat finger obscuring your vision very important in first-person shooters.

About as near as I can figure, the guys who came up with the idea that we would all want to treat our laptops the same as our tablets, spent a little too much time sniffing model airplane glue as kids. A touch screen is a compromise in a tablet so you don't have to carry around a mouse. I only hope that the public doesn't try to embrace laptops masquerading as tablet computers. Sure there is a place for tablets, just don't try to make my laptop or desktop computer behave as one.