Multitasking on a phone: can it be done?
I’ve been writing articles on my Nokia E71 while traveling for some time now and it’s working really good if I follow some basic rules. Most of those rules are meant to overcome the limitations of the smaller screen a Smartphone has and the limited multitasking capabilities.
Multitasking
Practically I write small articles (try and write on a phone keyboard for more than 30 minutes and your fingers will catch fire) and always put small notes in places where I must get a link or double check stuff or insert pictures. And I always write about topics I’m familiar with so I don’t need to get any documentation checked or I’ve already read about it the day before on my desktop PC.
What’s stopping us from multitasking on a phone and do some real work?
- first there’s the small screen which makes reading really hard, plus pictures download harder on a phone, taking more time and bandwidth to check
- limited power means you can’t run a browser with multiple tabs opened and you can’t also run a text editing suite, a graphic editor for pictures and listen to music in background without affected performance
- last but not least the interface of mobile apps prevent us from being proficient as we’re just at the beginning of the mobile revolution and we have limited mobile usability knowledge
How about the future?
I’m afraid things don’t look too good as screen size can’t increase too much without affecting size thus portability is compromised.
Hardware specs will increase but it’s just enough to cope with the increasing performance demand from software apps: it’s just like with PCs where increased performance doesn’t necessarily means faster overall experience but more like complex programs.
Software is the only one that will make a significant change in how we work using a Smartphone but don’t forget that we’re dealing with a small device after all, not a fully fledged workstation. So a laptop will always be slower than a desktop, but faster than a Smartphone. That’s the way things are folks but this doesn’t stop us from dreaming.
