Last weeks I had an extremely busy project (and I have to apologize to our readers, I did not post as much as intended last month). As mentioned earlier, one of the demands to enter the location was the total abolishment of any electronics you have with you when you enter the building. Because the lockers are barely capable of holding two cellphones (one personal, one private) I am forced to leave my laptop at home. But life goes on and I do want to check my e-mail when I'm out of reach all day for most people. Although it is a holiday season now in Europe, some business continue to work and I'm the guy at our company that tries to keep things together a bit.

This has resulted in me having to use my JasJar for several weeks now for the most basic routines: reading/responding to e-mail, writing reports and browsing the internet for preliminary research. It is a bit like falling in love, the first day it is all great just to be able to use it, after a couple of days you start to notice the problems. Now, after a couple of weeks, I am completely used to fully depend on my PocketPC knowing what problems I have and don't have.

I personally must say I'm quite surprised how well it worked. Besides a SPAM-problem, which is really hard to fight on a PocketPC, I had few problems that were not easily to be solved. For some things you really need a laptop, for example some of my collegues sent me an attachment that I could not read.One of them is Microsoft Visio, which is a commonly used application in our company, and there is no Visio viewer for PocketPC.

But besides the ocassional unreadable attachment, technically it is a good working solution. Personally I think it is not capable of replacing a laptop. It has nothing to do with the capabilities of the devices, technically they are quite capable of replacing a laptop. A I-Mate JasJar (Qtek 9000) with the right software installed might prove to be quite a competitor for a laptop. It might even have a much better batterylife.

After my three week experiment I must conclude that a PocketPC start to become less effective as a laptop replacement is when you really start to produce things. Although there is software to improver everything, a PocketPC is physically a smaller device. Besides the obvious problem of less text on a VGA screen, typing becomes much slower. It seems that on a JasJar (which is even a collosal PocketPC compared to other devices on the market) it is near to impossible to type with more than your thumbs. This is not much of a problem when you have to do a quick reply, but when I have to do more than that, I really am looking for more speed than just my thumbs. My current estimate is that a regular note  (so much typing, almost no thinking) that I would type on a laptop in 10 minutes, takes about 30 minutes on my PocketPC. It does get done in some lost time, so it is out of the way in an efficient way but it could be more efficient. I must say, if I had to make the notes on the spot, it probably would be more efficient to use my PocketPC because than I have to do a lot of thinking and than make a small note. Witing them down after the fact, makes the use of a PocketPC less efficient because I don't have to think as much, but just do some copy paste stuff from paper.

In the end, I'm glad to return to my laptop. A PocketPC is a great tool while on the road, but it is great to be able to use a real keyboard and big screen again. Some overview and a decent way of writing is really necessary for the real reports.

Jaap van Ekris
in Life on the road
Posted at 09:06:15 UTC