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About a month ago, I went out and bought an iPhone. By and large, I love this little device, and not only because its a gorgeous gadget. I also love it because it allows me to minimize my computational needs while traveling–to such an extent, in fact, that several of my colleagues and I are embarking on what we call the “iPhone Experiment”.

Here’s how it works. When we travel (across town or across the continent) we do some hard thinking about what we really need to take with us. Do we need the full-fledged laptop? Probably not. What do we really need?

* a device that allows us to call, email, and text our colleagues (and receive same)
* a device that allows us to surf the web
* a device that allows us to enjoy personal music and photos and other stuff if we need to kill some time
* a device that allows us to record notes and data
* a device that allows me to make photographic records of where I’m at (whether that be shots of people, objects, vistas, whiteboards, whatever)

Now the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard isn’t the greatest input device for my fat fingers, so I bring along a quadrille notebook (I love that I can write and draw on the little squares) and a trusty pen.

Over the past month, I’ve learned how to trust this minimal kit–I don’t need to be able to review every single document right now, thank you very much (but if you send me PDF, I can preview it nicely on the iphone). I don’t need to be tethered to every single electronic heartbeat that my colleagues and clients send out. I don’t need to do word processing on the fly. I’ll be back to my desk in a few hours (or days).

I don’t have the annoying immediacy of the Blackberry (you have to request email manually) and that’s okay by me. Others who have made the switch to iPhone find this particularly hard, but I always hated the constant interruption, as thought I were some kind of Magistrate that needed constant consulting.

If I need further electronic backup, I carry around a 1 GB thumb drive. That way I can transfer files (and receive them) without the lag of email.

It’s not perfect, but its mighty fun to go through airport security without the laptop, knowing that I have a lot of what I need right in my pocket.

More later on the experiment.

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