In computer news this week January 28, 2009
The
future of personal computing .. Part 4
What can
you do on a cell phone better – easier – and cheaper – than you can on a
personal computer ?
With 7
times more cell phones in the world than personal computers, cell phones are
beginning to take over tasks previously done only by pc’s.
One of the reasons there’s 7 times more cell phones in the world than personal
computers is that cell phones are much cheaper – from under $40 COMPARED TO $
400+, and also much simpler to learn and operate.
So our
question is what are the things people do on their computers that might be done
on cell phones?
One of
the main things done on pc’s is sending email to other
pc’s.
Most cell
phone user are familiar with texting to other cell
phones.
But an interesting feature I found is that a cell phone can send a text message to a computer, and vice versa, and I’ve found that the majority of both cell phone users and computer users don’t know this. And not all cell phone companies support this texting feature.
Probably the simpler of the 2 is to send a text message from your cell phone to a pc user, just using their email address. You just create a text message and send it to your friends email address, and they will receive it and see that it’s from your cell phone.
The question on the other side of this communication link is how do you find out what your cell phone’s email address is ? Although there are many websites that will help you answer this question, I just sent myself a text message from my cell phone to my email address – received it in Outlook – and then I just right clicked on the message using the message options menu to see what my cell phone email address was. Then I moved this email to my contact folder so I can easily send back to my cell phone.
So a cell phone can make phone calls, and also it can send text messages and simple emails to a pc.
A pc can’t make phone calls, but it can send emails to other pc’s, and it can send emails to cell phones, probably much better than a cell phone can send an email to a pc. For example, I can be in Microsoft word, and decide I want to email that document to someone, and I can just sent it from inside word. And in many cases, the document would be bigger than what a cell phone could receive as a text message.
So pc’s can do a better job sending emails.
And the next thing people do on their pc’s is surf the web, so next week we’ll see how cell phones do at surfing the web.
For Raw
Bytes
This is
Frank Delaney
(C) 2008
MTA Micro Technology Associates
http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html
PO Box
31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522
(509)624-7230