Running In the Field: How to Make Your Handheld Your Best Friend

any people no longer even own a desktop; instead they love laptops, whether entry-level or expensive mobile workstations, and work on them exclusively. But laptops are too heavy to carry all the time, and too slow and cramped to be the equivalent of a desktop. Personally, I keep a desktop for heavy tasks, but carry a handheld with me all the time for less-demanding tasks—because modern handhelds are capable enough to handle many of the tasks I need to do. Sure, you can't (or wouldn't want to) write a long document or browse the web and get the full desktop experience, but the handheld can run my IMAP client and, most importantly, it can run specific vertical applications that make performing out-of-office field tasks fast and simple.

Mobile Devices and Mobile Workers
Most mobile devices today are mobile phones, or—if you prefer—many mobile phones are also powerful handhelds. However you prefer to think about the devices, they all provide a mobile computing platform with communications capability. I live in Italy (for now, at least until I can afford to move), where there are more mobile phones than people. Essentially, everyone has a mobile platform available. Therefore, everyone can run applications to handle some tasks without needing a laptop or desktop. In addition, most mobile phone can take good photos, and some can even detect your location, using an integrated GPS. Finally, most modern handhelds can connect to a Wi-Fi network and, of course, can connect to the Internet with wireless technology (for example Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), which provides several megabits per second of bandwidth).