Could I travel with just a smartphone?

Posted by Dave on 3 Feb, 2012 in Phone | 11 comments

With the increased power and screen size of smartphones in the last twelve months, I have often wondered to myself how realistic it would be to travel and stay connected without a laptop.  One less thing to break, lose, carry or insure, and definitely one less time waster when I should be out exploring.

The idea certainly appealed, and the opportunity to test it out came recently with a scooter-based road trip where travelling light was the only option.  For eight days a Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone was pretty much my only piece of technology.  Could I do it?

Task by task, here is how I went.

 

Email – 4/5

 

I use Gmail to manage my different email accounts, and in general it worked surprisingly well.  Emails came and went from the right accounts and most attachments could be easily viewed.  Office documents could be downloaded, edited and returned via the Polaris Office app that came with phone.

Email management was also straightforward, with labels, archiving and searching all handled well as long as the connection speed was fast enough.

The only issue was more around my patience than a technical failing.  I just couldn’t muster the motivation to compose lengthy mails using either the Swype or standard keyboard, and found myself saving them to deal with once I returned.  Had that not been an option then long emails were certainly possible – they just weren’t much fun to type. 

 

Web browsing – 4/5

 

 

Using the default browser on the Galaxy is usually fine and quite speedy, but sites without good (or any) mobile versions are a challenge to use.  Enter the Dolphin browser, which lets you ‘trick’ websites into delivering the full desktop version – and handles it remarkably well.  I played around with graphics heavy sites and even successfully edited a couple of web pages without a problem.

While browsing wasn’t totally flawless – there were a few rendering issues and a strange WordPress glitch – it was a far better experience than I expected.

 

RSS – 4/5

 

I already used NewsRob to manage and read all of the sites that I like via RSS.  It syncs with Google Reader and stores images and text for offline browsing, and I like it a lot.  Video only works with a data connection, but that isn’t much of a loss.

 

Facebook – 4/5

 

The Facebook app for Android provides most of the social network’s functionality, and what it doesn’t do (sharing links, for instance) the mobile or desktop sites will.  Uploading photos is simple, and the geotagging function is surprisingly useful.  If I could share links natively from the app and had a few more options for managing pages, it would be pretty much perfect.

 

Twitter – 3/5

 

I use (the old version of) Tweetdeck on my laptop to manage my Twitter accounts and really like it, but the Android version is nothing special and relying on it for a week was a chore.  Other than the fact that it crashed regularly and often ran very slowly, I didn’t love the notification system or the lack of an inbuilt photo shrinking tool.

Using a simple app like ImageShrink Lite helped with the photo sizing, and a different Twitter client might have worked better.  As it stood though, it barely rated a pass mark.

 

Camera – 4/5

The camera on the Galaxy S2 is impressive for a smartphone. Eight megapixel and with a decent native app, it takes pretty decent photos in daylight and passable ones at night thanking to the blinding inbuilt flash. Lack of an optical zoom means that I would usually choose to travel with a "real" camera as well, but for landscape and people photos I found myself using it far more than expected.

I didn’t find an application that I loved for photo editing, although Lightbox is passable. There are dozens of apps to apply crazy filters, but not many that allow for more subtle edits. A cut-down version of Adobe Lightroom, paid or free, would help a lot. Recommendations welcome!

 

Managing files – 3/5

 

I use Dropbox to store several of my most important documents, both for availability and backup reasons. The Android app makes it simple to move files up and down and save them locally. Making small edits to Office documents is easy enough, although like any such task creating large files would be cumbersome.

Copying large numbers of files elsewhere seems to tax the phone more than it should. Moving a few dozen photos from internal storage to the micro-SD card, for instance, took over an hour and made the phone extremely hot, while bulk uploads also took much longer than the connection speed would suggest.

 

Writing blog posts – 2/5

 

This was a fairly unpleasant experience.  The WordPress app, somewhat buggy as it is, does the best it can with limited screen size and input ability but still isn’t great.  Writing a lengthy blog post like this one, creating/sourcing images and laying them out properly, and switching back and forth from browser to editor when researching information is just far more time consuming and difficult than on a laptop.

If my blogging style was different – shorter posts, fewer photos – this wouldn’t have been such an issue, but in the end I gave up and waited until the end of the trip.  If a phone was my only option for creating content then my approach would have to change significantly to make it work for me.

 

The final word

 

 

So, after all of that, the big question:  could I travel with just a smartphone?  The answer, I guess, is it depends.  As a blogger I don’t think I could – the limitations are just too great.  Editing photos, research and writing posts in particular were a lot more difficult than I have time or patience for.

If I was just travelling without trying to work however, things would be different.  The hardware and software are now sufficiently usable that a laptop – and perhaps even a separate camera – are not necessities.

Using a phone for all of your technology needs on the road is definitely not as good as using a laptop.  As I found, however, it may well just be good enough.

 

So what do you think?  Have you tried travelling with just a phone recently?  If not, could you?

 

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