Are We There Yet?

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For many of us, especially those working at the cutting edge of technology like myself, there seems to be a need to force technology into our everyday lives, even when it doesn’t make things easier. The last time someone asked you for a phone number, did you just read the number out to them? Or did you go through the whole song and dance of setting up Bluetooth pairing and then sending the whole contact over the ether, just because you could? I’m betting that a lot of you took the latter route, after all, what’s the point of having those features in your mobile phone if you’re not going to use them? Who cares that the whole exercise takes three times as long?

If you read my review of the Samsung Q1 Ultra Mobile PC a few days ago you’ll know that handwriting recognition has come a very long way over the past few years. In fact I can take notes pretty fast on the Q1, making it a viable tool for when I’m covering press briefings. However, when I say “viable tool” that doesn’t mean that it’s the best tool for the job, because it isn’t. No matter how good the handwriting recognition is on a PDA or UMPC, or how thin and light an ultra-portable notebook is, none of them can compare to a simple paper pad and pen.

You see a paper pad doesn’t have to recognise my handwriting, it’s up to me to do that when I’m reading back my notes. A paper pad doesn’t need a backlight and is viewable in pretty much every environment bar total darkness. A paper pad doesn’t run out of battery power at a vital point in the day. A paper pad weighs next to nothing and can be “truly” pocket size, unlike some mobile devices which require pockets the size of a rucksack. A paper pad won’t smash into lots of expensive pieces if I happen to drop it on the floor.

Of course I admit that there’s a hell of a lot of stuff that a paper pad can’t do, but what I’m talking about here is using the best tool for the job, and despite all the recent technological leaps, the best solution for jotting down notes is still a pen and pad.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not criticising technology’s attempts to make our lives easier, because there’s a myriad of examples that I could throw at you that prove how much time recent technological advancements have saved us. Take online shopping for example – I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am that I don’t have to waste three hours of my weekend wandering around a supermarket anymore. But what I am saying is that we shouldn’t feel that we MUST use technology to solve a problem, when a more traditional method could be a far simpler solution.

I’m in no doubt that map books and paper pads will become totally obsolete eventually. I’m sure that navigation devices will become lightning fast and 100 per cent accurate, and I’m just as confident that digital note taking devices will evolve to be just as quick and simple as jotting notes in a paper pad. But are we there yet? I don’t think so.

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