Can a Smartphone Replace a Laptop?

A while back, Hal Goldstein forwarded an e-mail to me, which proposed a “30 day no-laptop challenge.” The idea was to see if someone could get by for a month without their laptop PC, using their Windows Mobile smartphone for their business and personal computing needs. At first, I thought that there was no way I could replace my laptop PC with my AT&T 8525, a phone-enabled touch screen device. However, I love a challenge and decided to make a go of it.

My Cingular 8525 Windows Mobile Smartphone

My first step was to define the activities I’d be involved with and the computing capabilities needed to complete them. I divided these activities into four categories: home, work, activities with Smartphone and Pocket PC magazine, and Internet research. There is some overlapping between these categories, which I allowed to make sure there were no gaps in my list of activities. Finally, I noted the activities that my 8525 was capable of handling as is, and the areas that needed something more.

Conducting training classes and making presentations

Pocket Slides lets the user view and edit PowerPoint documents.

My specialty is employee development and training, and to accomplish my work I rely heavily upon Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. Fortunately, these applications are built into Windows Mobile devices, and they work well enough for most of the things I do. However, the PowerPoint Mobile application is rather basic, and only allows you to view existing PowerPoint documents. I frequently use PowerPoint to conduct training classes, and occasionally have to create new presentations or modify existing ones. If I truly wanted to use my smartphone as my primary computer, I would need a program that would allow me to do this.

Conduits Pocket Slides (touch screen device only; conduits.com) gave me this capability. Pocket Slides includes many useful tools found in the PC version of PowerPoint, allowing you to view and edit existing PowerPoint presentations and create new ones. Pocket Slides uses a proprietary document format, but includes conversion software that lets you convert existing PowerPoint documents to the Pocket Slides format, and vice versa. Edits made by Pocket Slides remain in the document when it is converted back to PowerPoint format. In addition, Pocket Slides provides VGA-out support, allowing me to connect to a VGA projector and make presentations directly from a Windows Mobile device. I ordered a Spetec VGA-out cable for my AT&T 8525 but it did not arrive in time for my test. I ended up using my HP iPAQ hx2795 for Pocket Slides presentations, but the results were exactly the same.

Tracking classes with Excel Mobile

NYDITOT Virtual Display provides better resolution for viewing Pocket Excel files.