This morning finds me back at the car repair shop that I visited a couple of days ago. It’s not that I find it a comfortable place to work — no, that’s not why I’m here. They had to order parts to finish the repairs to my old Volvo, and this morning the work is being done.
I’m sitting here in the waiting room, in typical waiting room chairs that are in no way conducive to working comfortably. I’m using three pieces of mobile tech, however, and that makes the work experience a productive one.
The Lenovo ThinkPad x200 is sitting in my lap currently, and I’m using it in laptop configuration. Typing is the task at hand, so laptop it is. I’m connected to the web via the Verizon MiFi, which is throwing its 3G goodness out for me to tap into my personal hotspot. These two gadgets are more than enough to get the job done, but I’m using a third simply because it makes it easy.
The Droid is out, too, and I’m using it for a certain task that experimentation shows me makes the most sense: to keep up with the hundreds of RSS feeds I track. I can easily do this on the laptop, but I found that I can spin through the huge number of feed items that constantly roll in faster using the Droid. I use the Google Reader page optimized for the iPhone, and that works perfectly on the Droid. I spin through the article titles, tap the yellow star to flag something to return to later, and basically fly through the feeds as fast as I can swoop down the page with my finger.
Once I’ve caught up with the feeds, I jump over to the ThinkPad and access the items I’ve flagged on the Droid. I can honestly say that I’ve covered as much ground, perhaps even more, than I do using just a browser on the PC. Maybe tasks like this explain the high Droid web usage being reported.
I had a flashback moment while sitting here working away. The repair shop has a TV in the waiting room, tuned to the local Fox News. I don’t normally watch Fox, but a glance up at the screen took me back. It seems one of the anchors is the Fox reporter who visited Mobile Tech Manor three years ago to interview me about the unboxing video phenomenon. It was a pleasant and unexpected flashback.
The smartphone sector is one of the fastest moving sectors in the mobile tech space. New phones appear almost daily, and the resultant race for the latest and greatest is a hectic one. Savvy consumers may be the only ones concerned about technical details such as OS version installed on a given phone, but it can make a big difference when it comes time to make a purchase. It is not always a given that smartphone X will get the next big OS upgrade, and even if it does the timing of said upgrade is not always fast. That leads to the question — how fast is fast enough for smartphone upgrades?
Augmented Reality (AR) is one of those 
