Literally Working on the iPhone
I had every intention of spending the majority of the weekend working on end-of-the-quarter grades and comments for the 100 or so students that I teach. I did get a little work done on Friday evening, but I still had plenty to do on Saturday.
So, Saturday afternoon I cranked up the school-issued white Macbook fully expecting to get to work. However, the keyboard isn’t working properly. I think I’ve diagnosed the problem after doing some searching (on the iPhone browser), and the fix will require some under-the-hood work that I’ll leave to our tech department. However, I decided to do a battery pull and a few hard restarts… which were good ideas except that I’m pretty much locked out of the computer unless I hook up an external keyboard.
In the meantime, I had a moment of pre-cloud crisis when I realized that I couldn’t get access to the files I needed on the computer. Then, I remembered it is 2009 and I could get this work done and data accessed via my iPhone. Yes, I do have other computers in the house, but they are all desktop boxes in our (non-heated) basement office and it’s Daddy Day Care weekend since the wife is on-call. On top of that, my MSi Wind is at school 1.5 hours away.
Nonetheless, the iPhone has been a champ of a device. I’m still sorry I moved from Verizon service-wise and I do wish I had an Android device (the coming Droid looks like a dream phone). However, between web access to my online gradebook, access to all of my data via Dropbox and Google Apps, TextExpander WriteRoom and QuickOffice, I’m all set and have been banging out paragraphs long comments on my students at a quick clip. Frankly, I’ve surprised myself with how quick and painless this process is on my iPhone because I anticipated a weekend of torture and sore thumbs.
So, yes… you can do “real” work on an iPhone in a pinch. Increasingly, it might not just be pinch moments.
And yes, I composed this on my iPhone.
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