How I Personally Use Mobile Computing in 2023

2023-01-23T15:23:00-08:00

Not necessarily profound, but some personal thoughts/checkpoints on how I use “mobile” computing in 2023. Motivated by following up with this post I made back in January 2010.

By far, an iPad with an external keyboard has become my primary and preferred means of communication.

Text messages, email, video, and even voice calls: I do all these things through my iPad nearly all the time. It has been this way for the past four years.
With cloud based messaging services, my bias is to use a mobile phone as a read-only device whenever I'm dealing with text.

Most of my communication writing is done on the iPad using an external keyboard.
Emotionally, I don’t think of a laptop as a “mobile” device anymore.

My 90% use case is to run it as a docked system connected to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. This is the case regardless if I’m at home or at work. It’s basically a desktop (albeit portable) computer to me now.
- That said, the option to run it as a laptop is still a great win for the cases when I need to. I’d still observe that these are exceptions to my day-to-day behavior.
Related to the above, whenever I need mobile access (via iPad or iPhone) to my laptop’s files, I use a terminal emulator.

I got an iPad 2nd generation on the day of its release in 2011, and for most of its life I found it great for consuming media but not much else. It was far from being a system I could do work with which entails a lot of writing, both of software and its documentation, journaling, and project planning. After a couple of years it went into the bookcase, unused.

Around 2018 I refreshed and got a 6th gen iPad. As a media consumption device, it was still great. But I was still concerned that I couldn't use it to create in the ways I was interested in. Then I learned about Blink shell, a terminal emulator that launched in 2017. Running a Blink on an iPad with an attached external keyboard turned it into the best 80’s-style thin client that could never have existed back in the 80’s. Coupled with mosh and tmux, as long as I had an internet connection, I could do work. An aside: I'd also observe that my dependency on Blink shell is co-mingled with using Emacs and in particular emacsclient over the years.

Since then, it’s a rare day that I don’t use my iPad.
Noted with chagrin that with the above, I’ve turned my laptop into a server.
Outside of some file data, most all the data state that I work with is “cloud”-based.

I rarely deal with manual data sync (outside of git repos) across multiple clients (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones). Most all of the data sync I use is automatically managed at the application level.

Slates/Tablets/Pads and Why They Matter: The Short Explanation

2010-01-12T00:19:00-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, Gruber posted his take on the possible Apple tablet computer announcement later this month. It's worth reading, but if you want the short explanation as to why tablets are getting buzz again, here's why:

The slate/tablet/pad form-factor packages computation as an appliance rather than as a data-entry terminal.

This is based on an old idea (Dynabook) but the right mix of hardware, software, user experience, and cloud services have never been at a state where a commercially successful implementation of it has been made. The fun thought is that 2010 is the year it all comes together.

notes from /dev/null - tablet

How I Personally Use Mobile Computing in 2023

Slates/Tablets/Pads and Why They Matter: The Short Explanation