Mobile, mobile me
Since I learned Monday how to take screen shots on my iPhone, I’m now ready to show the mobile side of me. I’m not particularly good at leveraging my iPhone to the hilt. Mostly, I use it for mundane things (compared to many I know), I:
- Talk on the phone sometimes
- Read CNN mobile at airports over dinners
- Take photos of my food from the airports to send home
(This is my new favorite dinner from the Go! Bistro at SFO where they proudly serve Japanese Curry with German Knockwurst for $12.99. No, thank you, I’ll have the spicy wontons and a Stella, please.)
- Send texts home from afield - “je suis ici and safe.“
- Tweet when the mood serves me
- Mostly, I keep connected to my work via email
- Peeved that my old Comcast email account is POP, not IMAP, since nothing syncs and I have to manually delete messages by hand
- Frustrated that I have to manually delete messages one at a time, Apple
Actually working online from my iPhone has been relegated to approving blog comments (thank you when you do! It’s always such a joy, even after four years of this, to get comments!), and occasionally searching for information I’ve been meaning to find “when I have a minute.”
The Mobile Clincher
Two things have happened to me recently (if you don’t count the cool iPhone screen shot lesson from @cowperthwait) that make me rethink how I use my iPhone.
- As a result of my mention of my favorite mobile tools in ReadWriteWeb, a company called Mippin transformed my blog for mobile phones. And I have to say, it’s pretty cool. It looks increadibly readable, kind of like an RSS feed of my blog in a nice, mobile friendly format. To see it in action on your smartphone, go here (when you’re on your smartphone, please.) This isn’t entirely narcissistic, really. It just got me thinking about how mobile data should be, and there are plenty of companies working on that very problem.
Now, the second thing is best told in relation to the first. Mippin gave me a special URL to access my blog from my phone:
http://mippin.com/mippin44571
…Which is fairly unwieldy and pretty impossible to remember for a 51 year old woman from Oregon. Let’s face it, my brain doesn’t keep numbers in storage quite the way that it used to. Curious, I went to my blog via Mippin, and the actual URL is worse yet! It was something like this:
http://mippin.com/mip/prev/list.jsp?id=44571&z=1@1228436219855252
Uh huh… thank goodness they shortened it for me in the first place!
To be fair, the Mippin folks also provided a bar code for me to access my blog. (I had to ask them wtf? and they were very kind to ‘enlighten’ me with the bar code concept. Apparently I’m not the only one… Doh!)
Well, you just know I had to Smub that. (There it is, the second thing to happen to me recently that changed the way I use my phone. And I’ve told plenty of stories about Smub lately.) Now, if you want to see how my blog looks on your mobile you can go to:
http://smub.it/janet/moblog
But I won’t make you wait - with thanks to Cowperthwait - here it is:
