Alistair Dabbs

High-powered mobile devices and the rise of digitisation are engaged in a tug of war over the user

The conflicting pressures of modern life are overwhelming. You’re encouraged to consume more but eat less, spend more time at home and more time at work, and come to think of it, do more work for less money. In the IT sector, the principal conflict is between fixed and mobile computing.

Surely, I hear you argue, mobile computing is where all the development work is at? Mobile and wireless technologies give us the freedom to travel and interact with real people face-to-face, while still connected and updated using a pocketful of electronic tricks. More than half of the press releases that arrive in my inbox are for mobile devices that promise to change my life, from smartphones to iPod accessories that quite frankly beggar belief (look up OhMiBod on Google).

At the same time, digitisation seems to want to keep me in my office chair for as long as possible. In my first job, I could stretch my legs with an occasional visit to a filing cabinet or a book shelf. I could pull out a file, skip up the stairs and discuss its contents with someone in another department. To do all this now requires an inordinate amount of computing power plus a phone call; if ad hoc visuals are required, I need to set up a video conference link – all from the comfort of my chair.

Far from making me more mobile, modern IT actually forces me to spend more time sitting down than ever before.

Consider a daily newspaper. Once upon a time anyone could read it on the bus, in the kitchen or on a park bench, and then fold it up and tuck it under an arm before striding off. Today, the chances are that half of you read your news online, or in an electronic form stuck in front of a computer.

The more mobile-savvy readers can demonstrate how to go blind by scrolling microscopic text on a 2in smartphone screen, while frantically trying to skip Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture on their OhMiBod.

So we’re stuck in technological limbo between what’s digital and what’s portable, while developers and users struggle to make practical sense of it all. A visitor to my personal blog spoke up to praise his Tablet PC as an e-reader for The New York Times, yet the only Tablet PC advantages I can see are in being able to view the newspaper’s pages in portrait orientation and use the stylus to fill in the crossword.

I’m more interested in the Sony Reader, a dedicated e-reader the size of a slim paperback book with a 170ppi screen. Yes, it’s expensive at around $400 (£215), but the price should come down once economies of scale kick in. Just imagine being able to carry around all your network documentation, support manuals, the latest IT Week and a copy of a few novels on one of these.

The more I can get away from this bloody office chair the better.

‹ ali@dabbsnet.com