Smart phone saviours

Hooray for Guest Post Wednesday and new guest poster Ben!

I have a bugbear. Something that pricks me and annoys me. Irritates me. Like someone scratching a blackboard. Enough sometimes to make the red mist descend and send me into an apoplexy of tempestuous rage.

Camera adverts.

Will you bite?

Great!

To me, camera adverts are a horrid manifestation of snake-oil salesmanship. The kind of salesmanship that manufactures a problem for which their product is a solution, rather than designing a solution to a problem which actually exists. These adverts often take the same form; a professional photographer, clickety-click, beautiful results. Hmmm. I work with pro photographers in the day job. I know how hard they have to work to create such beautiful photos.

So if you’re a professional or dedicated photographer then you probably need that stuff.

But for the rest of us?

You might be a blogger, a writer, a creative businessperson who wants to produce the most awesome content you can without a massive investment of money and time. (And without carrying twenty pounds of camera everywhere!) To me, creativity is spontaneous, random. If you’re the same then perhaps you’d like to express your creativity anywhere, any time.

Also you might not want to spend hundreds or more on an overpowered single function device whose full capabilities you’ll never really use.

I believe it’s possible to do more with less. I’ve subsumed over £1000 of equipment I used to own into… a smartphone.

The camera

I bet you’re already well on the way to making your phone your primary image-capture device. Ok, in terms of raw power a phone can’t compete with a DSLR but is it good enough? For me, totally!

Today’s smart phones are as powerful as desktop computers were not so long ago, so what you lack in raw resolution you can make up for in flexibility. Typically this means manipulating photos on your phone with apps and creative ways of unleashing the result on the outside world. I’ll not go through the thousands of photography apps available beyond telling you what’s blown my mind. I know and understand my iPhone 3GS so that’s what I’ll focus on but the same principle applies if you’re using any modern smartphone.

Best Camera
* Can be used in lieu of the standard camera app for taking photos.
* Gorgeous and simple editing capabilities.
* Fantastic integration with social networking sites.

Hipstamatic
* Can also be used instead of the standard camera app but I prefer to launch it for fun shots or where I don’t expect to do any editing (it’s that good).
* Strong integration with Flickr and Facebook.

JotNot Scanner
* Honorary mention; a replacement for a desktop scanner
* I use it to scan receipts and correspondence which can then be emailed as PDFs.
* If you only scan a few pages a day this could save you a lot of money and space.

Something I look for in apps is the ease with which you can get your work off the phone and into a project. Social network integration, the ability to save to your photo library and to email are key features that really come into their own when we look at video.

Camcorder

I don’t use any additional apps for video recording. Typically they’re small YouTube-length clips of friends and family acting like crazy fools. Again, the capabilities of my phone are good enough 99% of the time.

Video is where cloud-based services come into their own. I have much love for MobileMe and DropBox. Not only are they so simple and pervasively convenient but they can be used to store stuff to be actioned later or used to present your finished work to others. Very cool and nary a USB cable in sight. Unlike Flickr, YouTube etc. which seem best only at presentation.

Can this be generalised?

I’ve picked on photography and video as demanding but fairly logical examples of how to save money on multiple devices by converging their functions onto one. There are a few general ideas behind this method which might help you converge your tools:

Disregard techie features

For most people, gigahertz, megapixels and gigabytes are completely irrelevant. Ignore the language of systems and don’t let yourself get bamboozled into spending more money because a given device has a more impressive spec. It’s how these features are implemented that matters. Do they allow you to achieve a great workflow? Most single function devices suck at this.

Think about your processes, not about your systems

Systems and technology are fleeting. Keeping your systems up to date can be a time-consuming, expensive and fruitless process. Its the processes you achieve on those systems that count.

It’s easier with information.

You can do awesome stuff by converging processes that involve the manipulation and output of information. Think guitar tuner, recipe books, task management. Cloud-based services adds another dimension of brilliant to these kinds of processes by making it so much easier to send them to the outside world.

I hope this has given you some ideas on how to save money, ease your creativity and reduce your device footprint. I’d love to hear your thoughts. How could you apply this to what you do?

Ben Elijah writes about the creative process on his brand new blog, Unformation. He’s also trying to be the author of a novel and an ebook.

http://kirstyhall.co.uk/blog/ Kirsty Hall

There's an old photography saying – 'The best camera is the one you have with you.'

IME, if a camera is too heavy to carry around on a daily basis, I wind up not using it much. I upgraded my tiny camera to a slightly bigger, heavier one with a better lens but half the time I wind up throwing the smaller one into my bag.

And if I know that I only want an image for Twitter, I'll just use my iPhone but the quality isn't good enough for my blog.
http://hypno.co.nz/blogs Mike Reeves-McMillan

I use my iPod Touch as an alarm clock, a meditation timer, an Internet browser when I don't have my laptop on (to check or update Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads and Wikipedia, mostly), a calculator, a BMI calculator, a currency conversion calculator, a voice memo recorder and a notepad.

I look forward to being able to cost-justify an iPhone so that I can merge another device with it. And I also look forward to when an app that allows people to pay on it with PayPal using their credit card is approved for New Zealand, since that was one of the things that motivated me to buy it (only to find out that it wasn't available locally).
Mike Korner

Hi Ben. Great reminder!

The big key is that most cell phone users nearly always have their phone with them. This has blindsided manufactures of other devices.

My phone still doesn't take good enough pictures for my uses but some phones do. I think the phone is a key player for the long haul … phone, photo camera, video camera, replacement for watches and alarm clocks, emerging as electronic wallet, replacement for voice recorders, and now even being used to capture check images (in the United States anyway) for mobile payments.

I won't be long and it will probably be the CPU for a ultra-mobile computer using a holographic keyboard and heads up display. From there, I guess they become phasers like on Star Trek
http://www.chewdigestbooks.com Gwen

I am the same way with my iTouch. I use it for almost everything, seriously the best gadget I have ever bought. Would love to have an iPhone, but AT&T service isn't so great here. Until Verizon has something compatible that I can justify, I will stick with my BB Storm.
http://www.chewdigestbooks.com Gwen

Really thought provoking post. There is a saying around here, “A true craftsman doesn't blame his tools.” That applies here, it isn't that we need to fastest newest thing on the block, we need to learn to use what we have better. We call ourselves creative, who says that our art is the only time we need to think outside of the box?
http://fight-mediocrity.com/ Gareth

I like having separate devices for specific tasks. My phone should be a phone, my camera should be a camera, my phaser should be a phaser.

I do this so that when I have a specific task to do I eliminate a lot of the distractions.

But, I use gmail for lots. I have draft posts written, task lists, reminders, incubating projects, pretty much everything that needs to be written down ends up in there. Sometimes the flow isn't great and some of the stuff is a bit of a workaround, but the benefit of not having to learn a new user interface or shortcut commands is huge.
benelijah

Great shout Mike! Alarm clock, how could I have missed that, oops!
benelijah

In case you feel the need to vaporise someone on the train, I like it!
benelijah

Hi Gwen, thanks! And I totally agree, never met a great engineer who worried about having the latest screwdriver. I think that convergence is about much the same thing. And saving money never hurts either .
benelijah

Hey Gareth, great feedback! I guess the most important thing is that we're producing the best stuff we can and that the systems we use are nothing but total slaves to that. Managing distractions is something I struggle with sometimes so any advice you have would be great.
http://twitter.com/ThingsBright Elizabeth Drouillard

I can second the hipstomatic love. will look into the others

I can apply this to what I do today by taking some shots with my iphone and just get them up there rather than being annoyed and continuing to wonder where my lost camera battery pack is….
http://www.BeAwesomeOnline.com Catherine Caine

I was looking through my iPhone photos and almost all of them are photos for Twitter.
http://www.BeAwesomeOnline.com Catherine Caine

I actually use the alarm to wake up for easrly sessions now and put it on the bedside table next to… the actual alarm clock. The phone is just much easier to change times on.
http://www.BeAwesomeOnline.com Catherine Caine

Seconded.
http://www.BeAwesomeOnline.com Catherine Caine

That DOES sound more efficient, yes.
Mike Korner

Funny story – so this afternoon I left my dentist's office and could seem to get my car door to open. I was trying to open it using my phone instead of the key remote. Drain bramage
http://fight-mediocrity.com/ Gareth

I'm probably not the best person to give advice on managing distractions. My approach is normally allow the distractions but return to what I want to be focusing on every so often. Eventually my brain stops acting like an ADHD squirrel on speed and I move into a super-focused state in which there aren't any distractions.

I'm going to have to give this a lot more thought as I know there is more to it than that, but the caffeine hasn't taken yet this morning. Perhaps a post next week.