Productivity in the Cloud...

Last year I did a post called At Peace With Paper... in it I describe my affinity for paper planning devices... and how over the years... with all my cool electronic gadgets... I have been unable to resist the allure of my leather bound day planner. A few months later... I did a post called iPhones and Blackberries... where I talk about moving from my trusted Blackberry to the yet unproven iPhone 2.0.

Well here we are a year later and I haven't put my iPhone on eBay... although I thought about it more than once... and furthermore... I may have finally kicked my Franklin Covey habit. How did this happen? Let me explain...

As you might imagine... especially if you follow me on TripIt... my travel schedule can get pretty hectic. Shoot... it is not just my travel schedule... it is life. I value being able to have access to my data anytime and anywhere... no matter what device I happen to be on... and no matter what I am doing. Long story short... a couple of products converged for me that have pretty much revolutionized my ability to stay organized on the go.

iPhone 2.0

So... this is the on-the-go platform... the enabler. All of the problems with the iPhone are still there... no cut and paste... no email search... no real keyboard... no background listening for non-native apps... it goes on an on. What had made the iPhone totally sticky for me are the apps... not just any apps though... apps that have web based counterparts and sync their data to the cloud.

Evernote

The first application that really got me was Evernote. If you not familiar with Evernote... it is a free hosted application that allows you to store files... clip websites... record voice notes... and almost anything else you might envision saving up into the cloud. That is and of itself is cool... but it also has a client for the iPhone and I can email stuff to Evernote too! Anything I save to Evernote I can take with me on the iPhone. There is also a fat client for the PC and a version that runs from a U3 jump drive. I have my data... anytime... anywhere... from any device I happen to be working on.

ToodleDo

This is really the one that has been revolutionary for me. ToodleDo is a hosted site that allows you to track and manage your todo list. Wait you say... why not just track your todo list in Outlook? Many of my todo's come in the form of email. I have always wanted the ability to forward email to my todo list... and ToodleDo allows me to do this. The iPhone version is wonderful... and as you might imagine... my todo list is kept up to date in both places. Awesome

Jott

And here is the glue... I don't have much use for Jott's iPhone app... but here is what Jott does that is totally cool. I can call Jott from my cell phone and tell the service I want to send a note to Toodledo. It will transcribe my note and add it to my todo list automatically. Jott also has integrations with other apps... but ToodleDo is the real winner. I just don't need to Jott to Twitter... but the application will do it if I ever get the urge.

Google Calendar

This just keeps getting better and better. I have my iPhone sync to my Outlook calendar and my Outlook calendar sync to Google Calendar. The cool thing is that on Google Calendar I can add my wife's calendar and she can add mine. I can also unify my TripIt calendar and any other .ICS calendars I find particularly interesting. Much... much better than keeping separate calendars in our own paper systems... or even electronic systems.

It's not perfect yet... I think that iPhone 3.0 is going to help simplify my calendaring setup and give me more functionality. iPhone 3.0 is going to fix many of my frustrations with the core platform... I hear it will have cut and paste, email search, and background listening. The fact these apps all talk to each other is really the killer concept. The fact that they have multiple clients depending on what I am doing at that moment is even cooler. I am totally geeked to see what these companies do over the next few years.

I still carry my paper planner with me... but find I use it much less often. There are days when I miss my Blackberry... but 3.0 should fix that. Life in the cloud is pretty good so far.

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Push eMail Addiction

Okay... I have not really written anything in the past few weeks while I got prepared for Agile 2008 and my subsequent ASPE webinar this past Tuesday. I have to admit, I am kind of tired of thinking agile thoughts for the moment.

Give me the weekend and I'll get back in the game.

I did have an experience last week at Agile 2008 I'd like to share with you guys. A few posts back, I was lamenting the things my new iPhone didn't do that my Blackberry was very good at.

One thing noticeably absent from my commentary was the iPhone's battery life. At the time I wrote that post I'm not sure I knew how bad it actually was. If I have GPS, Bluetooth, 3G, Wi-Fi, and push email running at the same time, and I don't use the phone as an actual phone, I can sometimes get the battery to last about 5-7 hours. That is just terrible.

Last week, while at Agile 2008, I turned all those services off so I could actually have a phone for the entire day. The good news was that I could get the phone to work from 6 AM to sometime after midnight. Not stellar, but acceptable. I was able to function.

So... now the point of this post. When I wanted to get email, I actually had to go into the mail client and check for it. I basically went an entire week with no push email. You know what... I didn't even miss it. The world did not come to an end and no major catastrophe took place becuase I didn't instantly get notified of every new mail that hit my inbox.

The last evening of the conference I was sitting at dinner with a good friend of mine that still has his Blackberry. We were discussing the conference and a myriad of other personal things going on in our lives. It was a great conversation, pretty deep, and pretty meaningful. Our dinner was interrupted no less than five times with an incoming email. Is there anything that important?

Do people deserve to have email answered immediately? Is that a reasonable expectation in today's day and age? Shouldn't the people we have dinner with be able to expect our undivided attention? Is it too much to ask someone to be fully present for an intimate conversation?

It seems that the Blackberry has created a world where we expect instantanous response. I have been on both sides so I am in no place to judge. I've decided for myself that people need to be able to wait 24 hours. If you have to get a hold of me, give me a call. If you choose to send email, expect to wait a few hours for me to get back to you.

For now, I am leaving push email off on my new iPhone. I like my life better without the constant intrusion of email.

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iPhones and Blackberries

So… if you happening to be following me on Twitter or Plaxo, you'll know that I just switched from a Blackberry to an iPhone. The Blackberry was a fixture in my life for many years. My six year old even knew what it meant to be Crackberry Addict and thought it was funny to give me grief over my addiction.

I am sure I am going through some sort of post-Blackberry traumatic stress syndrome. I may very well be dealing with a high-tech version of the shakes. That said, humor me while I share a few observations about this new iPhone and how it compares to the old Blackberry.

The latest Blackberry in my possession (I had 5 different models at one time or another) was Blackberry Curve 8310. The Curve is a very cool device. Great form factor and small with a full Qwerty keyboard. I thought it was a great device until I found out version 4.2 of the OS has a memory leak. After a few days of normal use, the device would start deleting my email messages. This is how the device is designed to behave when it runs out of memory.

It was impossible to use Telenav for more than a few minutes, Google Maps was problematic, and much to my chagrin I was unable to use Guitar Hero III Mobile Edition. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. No Guitar Hero III? What kind of crap is that!

After waiting for months for a patch I got fed up and started looking for other devices. Now that the iPhone has GPS and support for Active Synch it became a viable candidate and now I have a new iPhone. And by the way, my old Curve is listed on eBay. If you happen to be interested, and you might be after this post, you can click here to Buy It Now.

My overall opinion of the iPhone is that it is the coolest piece of consumer electronics I have ever owned. It is beautiful, the interface is slick, I love its seamless integration with iTunes, the audio is fantastic, the web browsing is great, and I can pour a virtual beer and pretend to drink it. I have not found Guitar Hero III yet, but other than that, what more could you ask for in a business device?

Wait a minute… none of that stuff I mentioned makes it particularly good for business. It makes it fun, it makes it cool, and it makes it neat, but it does not make it good for business. Your business might be different from mine, so who am I to judge. I do want to share with you a few things that the iPhone does not do that I think are going to kill it for the business user:

• No ability to do a full text search through anything. That includes your address book, your email, your calendar, or your todo list. It is very fast scrolling through data and I admit maybe that should be enough. I miss full text searching
• No ability to cut and paste. Someone told me that is supposed to be included in release 2.1.
• No ability to invite a user to a meeting from the calendar. Sure, I have my calendar synched with Outlook but am unable to create a new invitation and ask someone to join me in one motion.
• I miss the integrated mailbox of the Blackberry. I have to go to too many places to find new messages. SMS is in one application, email in another, instant messages in yet another.
• It generally takes me about 6 clicks to get from one inbox (for work email) to another inbox (for personal email). I find that very frustrating.
• Blackberry was able to push my personal email, no matter who my provider was. iPhone is selling push email but you have to do Exchange integration or use their MobileMe. Both work fine but I want to be able to push Gmail too!
• Someone told me you could do background Instant Messaging but I have yet to see it work. I want to be able to be working in email and get an alert that someone is trying to message me. This could be a user training issue, but no one had to train me on the Blackberry.
• Best I can tell, I am unable to tell the maibox to delete all messages, mark all read, mark all unread, or delete messages prior to a certain date. Not a huge deal, but seems it should be easy to implement.
• eMail comes in its native format. If it is HTML, the message is HTML. If it is plain text, I get plain text. Rich text, I get rich text. That is cool… but… if the message is HTML sometimes the text is really small. In the Safari browser I can rotate the device and the screen will rotate. In the mail client this is not the case. My only option is to resize the message and then use my fingers to scroll around and read the message. Not so cool.

I also find the iPhone much harder to use one handed. Where this really aggravates me is when I am driving. I have decided that this is a feature that will probably keep me alive so I am going to give Apple a pass. I am using my iPhone much less on the road than I used my Blackberry. The Blackberry was so easy to use one handed, it encouraged bad habits. If you like to use your Blackberry while you drive, and you know who you are BCS, you might really want to reconsider this device.

One last thing... I find the virtual keyboard very difficult to type on. That said, the iPhone is excellent at figuring out what word I actually wanted to type, so this has been okay, but is not helping me get more accurate.

So… in summary:

The iPhone is totally cool. I am happy I have it and am willing to change how I think about mobile devices. If I were still in mainstream corporate America, I would not be able to use it. There is just too much basic business functionality it is missing to make it a viable alternative.

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