This blog entry is part of a continuous writing on the topic of “optimizing smartphone usage for smarter life”.
If you haven’t done so, please start reading from the first article on this series.
This blog post is the final part to wrap up 8 posts I previously wrote about optimizing smartphone for smarter life.
I will write this guide based on iPhone. Simply because iPhone is my primary smartphone for now. Most of my tips and guides should be applicable for Android, Windows Phone and other smartphone OS. But you might need to do a bit of more research to find out how to get similar function in that OS.This guide will NOT teach you step-by-step how to setup or use the features. Rather, I am trying to inspire you with a feature’s functionality and how we can benefit from it to live smarter life. More productive, more time efficient, more organized.
Epilogue
Back in the era of “dumb-phones”, we can just borrow a phone from a friend, play around with it for few minutes, and have our conclusion about whether we like it or not. All we need to do is looking at the screen, making a test phone call and making a test text message, then we know the overall feel of that phone.
With smartphones, things are different. Borrowing a smartphone from a friend and play with it for few minutes will give us very little information about its fullest capability (or weakness). Going to a store and play around with demo units will only give us a narrow understanding about the products strengths and weaknesses, mainly we will focus only on the partial hardware: the build quality, the screens, the screen responsiveness. Yes they are important. But excitement over these things will only noticeable for the first few weeks after we buy a smartphone. For the rest of the time, what we will interact with is the software, the system.
Imagine borrowing a smartphone from a friend for few minutes. Can we check our email using it? Technically we can, but it’s not as easy as the owner’s experience in checking his/her email as email accounts are deeply integrated into the system setting, making a smartphone very personal. Can we check our Facebook account using other people’s smartphone in few minutes? Technically we can, but it’s not going to be the same experience with the owner’s.
Now let’s talk cloud integration, namely iCloud, Google services and other services like Dropbox. No matter what is the mobile phone of your choice, you haven’t really use your smartphone to its full potential before you integrate these cloud integrations into your multiple devices. Arguably one of the MOST convenient thing in using smartphone is the fact that we CAN work in multiple devices. We can read or write something in our desktop computer, then continue it in our tablet when we have a meeting, then continue it in smartphone when we’re on the go. No matter which device we use, we’ll always see the same files, with the latest update we have saved.
To be able to unlock a smartphone’s true potential, we need deep integration into the phone’s ecosystem, settings and accounts. The ease of using email is an important experience in using a smartphone, starting from getting notifications, reading new emails, writing or replying emails and finding old emails. Social media experience is important (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc). Wireless sync is important. Even the easiness (or difficulty) of finding a new good-quality app of a purpose we need is important. Apple’s AppStore and Google Play has TONS of apps. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that finding a good app in those pile of apps is easy. Many of them are crappy apps, or counterfeit ones.
Sometimes, using our smartphones with deep integration requires more than just signing in account usernames and passwords. Some features actually work good when there are various devices together. Some others require us to change our mindset of how we usually do things, like the concept of “file explorer” in desktop computers vs the concept of app encapsulation in iOS devices. These are two different approach of doing things. Neither is better than the other. Another example is Google’s approach on Google Docs files, a mix between offline copy and cloud storage.
When Apple released iPhone 5, many people complained about how it lacks of innovation or anything new. They claimed it’s too similar with the previous model. When Samsung released Galaxy S4, many people also complained on how similar it looks from the previous Galaxy S3. Some people thinks it’s not worth the upgrade for the non-drastic new stuff. I bet these people never even looked at how the products compares to the old ones in deeper integration level. How it handles the sync, how it enhances user experience. To these people, screen size becomes more important than the actual features.
What is innovation? Innovation is something new, something drastically different from anything we’ve seen before. By its very definition, it should be clear that major innovation won’t happen every year. It takes time and efforts to innovate, they don’t just pop up out of nowhere. After an innovation, naturally there will be years of iterative improvements, until the time of the “next innovation” comes. Yet I don’t understand how so many people seem to miss this simple fact and hoping for major innovation every year.
Another trap is believing marketing material that lists features a smartphone CAN do. Most people who use the features at surface level will not notice that “CAN DO something” is very different at “GOOD AT something”. Having a smartphone that’s GOOD AT 20 features is most of the time better than a smartphone that CAN DO 50 features with glitches and user-friendliness issues. Only when we experience our smartphone at deep integration, we get to know and understand how the auto sync feature works for each different services. How often we see problems in syncing. How frustrating the process can be when things don’t go as we expected? How far can we believe and rely on that service to take care of our working needs?
How about stop hoping for something “big” from upcoming smartphones and start using our current smartphones more effectively?
How about stop judging other brand’s smartphone before we ACTUALLY use it at deep integration level?
Because seeing lists of technical specs, hardware design and screen size is just a tiny chunk of the whole experience in using a device.
Optimizing Smartphone for Smarter Life, list of topics in this series:
1. Calendar, Reminders, Notes
2. Maps and Trip Planning
3. Communication and Collaboration
4. Reading and Learning
5. Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation
6. Content Creation
7. Personal Database
8. Saving Money
*. Epilogue
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Apple and/or Google and do not receive any financial benefit from writing this article.
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