I was trying to convert an audio clip to an mp3, so that I could share it with friends. The more I searched for free software from my laptop, the more of a futile effort it seemed to become. There are reams of reviews to pieces of software that you can’t actually get, and lots of software that’s well protected by layers of adverts or weird pre-installer/pre-downloader software. In the end I picked up my Android phone, searched on Google Play and downloaded the top rated app to do the conversion – solving the whole problem in minutes.
If that’s not indicative of the way things are going I don’t know what is.
I’m struggling with the mental concept because I love my laptop so much, but mobile phones have actually started to be more USEFUL than their predecessors. I don’t mean from a I-can-check-my-email perspective, but from an actual I-need-to-this-complex-action perspective. Excepting better keyboards and larger screen areas, there’s not much that can’t be done any more. If Microsoft ever releases MS Office for Android I’m going to have to throw my laptop away. It’s probably the only thing keeping my tied to it.
We do so much on our mobiles already that none of this is probably a shock to you. It’s a little bit of a shock to me, only because the geeky/technical things I used to do on my laptop, are now becoming easier on my mobile. So it looks like 2014 might finally be the year of the mobile for me.