Do you need a Smartphone?

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Most of you will have a so-called smartphone, but how many of you with smartphones use the extra functions regularly, especially if you are mostly home based – is it really worth having one?

This question arose when an accounting forum I belong to, (AccountingWEB) posted a comment from a member (Martin) who was debating whether or not the time had come to replace his 10-year-old Nokia.

For Martin and anyone else asking the same question – it really IS all about you. In my opinion, if your current phone is 10 years old and you’re asking the question, the answer has to be that you don’t need one. Whether you could change your life and make use of one is a completely different question.

Thanks to the miracle of miniaturisation, if the PC you’re using is more than a couple of years old, the smartphone you might get on typical deal is probably faster and packs more memory than your desktop or laptop.

But exchanging a 10-year-old Nokia for a superfast smartphone is a bit like going straight from a moped to a 1,600cc Harley-Davidson Fat Boy, as seems so popular among many late middle-aged men. Using a smartphone is a lot less physically dangerous, but will you be able to handle all that extra power? And more importantly, do you know where you want to go with it?

The answer boils down to your inner desires and technological habits. If you are comfortable with the bigger screens and physical keyboards attached to PCs and don’t need 24/7 access to the net, what’s the point of changing?

A good smartphone could transform your working life; but as often happens with techy things, changing one element may demand a major rethink about a lot of other aspects of your set up. The best 3G/4G coverage or long-term plan might be available from a different supplier than your current landline provider. Or the glitzy smartphone that everyone tells you to get will create incompatibilities and niggles with the software you work with on a daily basis.

A sceptic’s view from Andrew Hyde of AccountingWeb – of course you need one, otherwise you will find yourself:
• Actually listening to people you are having dinner with
• Sleeping through the night instead of being woken up by the arrival of yet another unwanted message
• Concentrating on the road when driving
• Having to find other ways of annoying people on public transport
• Thinking about things, instead of replying instantly to an email/text with a misspelt, rude, half-witted, ungrammatical, stream-of-consciousness, knee-jerk reply
• Rejoining the human race.

Apart from identifying whether you really want one and will know how to use it effectively, the next most important consideration is to work out what you might actually use the thing for. Paying £40 a month to make a few calls and send some texts does not make a sensible business case. You’ve also got to have the aptitude, enthusiasm and commitment to make the investment in a smartphone worthwhile and you may well need a bit of training and advice before you set off down that road

But what are the possibilities for someone like Martin? If you regularly travel to clients, then a smartphone can make life very easy and, if properly set up, you have your emails, contacts, diary etc to hand, this data is backed up and amendments in one device get replicated elsewhere.

Having taken all those personal factors into account, then consider the technical issues. One of the most important concerns the local mobile signal. If you get out a lot and are looking forward to all that flexible functionality, be warned, if the coverage in your area is only 2G, browsing the web, downloading etc will be hopelessly slow. Emails will work, but very slowly.”

Even if you are blighted by poor mobile signals, free Wi-Fi is now available in lots of locations including coffee shops, pubs, trains and stations. If you’re a BT Broadband customer, the BT Openworld network lets you piggyback on other customers’ routers in all sorts of places.

However, you’ll have to be prepared to accept the security risks of hooking up to public contact points. In such settings, you should be more cautious about sending/uploading confidential client documents, entering passwords or accessing bank and other sensitive services.

Going with your existing supplier would be the path of least resistance, but there are some good arguments for looking at a separate mobile supplier. A different network from your landline provider gives you a back-up system if your main line goes down – and if you do have a 3G signal, you can tether your PC to the mobile (which will also keep it charged) and use it to connect to the net.

Not all mobile companies are the same when it comes to coverage. Where you think you’ve got a poor mobile signal, users of other companies might not. Ask friends in the area about how satisfied they are with their providers.

Also, with so many packages available and with widely different monthly costs, decide which will be of most use to you. Do you really need unlimited download capacity? Will you really use 500 minutes and unlimited texts?

Compatibility: which Smartphone operating system?

The next technical question is about the software you currently use for other tasks. One argument doing the rounds now is that there’s so little to choose between the physical devices that your fundamental choice boils down to the smartphone’s operating system. Each of the options will consign you to a world where the smartphone and its masters want to ensnare you in their digital universe, known in the tech business as “lock in”.

You’ve just got to accept that as a fact of technological life and be aware of the implications as you choose from the following options:

• Android – While it lags behind Apple’s iOS, Google’s system is growing fast, thanks to its open development philosophy and more recently its presence on a lot of Samsung’s devices. Android phones are designed from the ground up to integrate with Google’s apps including Gmail, Drive, Calendar, YouTube and so on. It may not be as slick as Apple, but Android can handle most of the typical small business person’s needs for much less cost.
• Apple iOS – Still the clear smartphone market leader but losing ground fast to Android. Apple’s simple, user-centric interface is easy to use, but Apple’s secretive, closed development philosophy is a weakness.
• BlackBerry – You may not hear much about BlackBerrys, but they are still around. Touchscreens are de rigeur in the smartphone world, but many BB addicts still vouch for the superiority of their physical QWERTY keyboards. In development terms, BlackBerrys are Android-like, but are not gaining as much support from third-party developers.
• Windows – Nestled alongside BlackBerry at the less fashionable end of the smartphone market is good old Windows, the program you may have used for the past 20 years. But don’t overlook it. Windows 8 is ahead of the game when it comes to unifying mobile and desktop systems and is getting a lot of positive feedback for the quality of the user interface. More importantly, it’s compatible out of the box with Office 365 and SkyDrive. That means it offers the best mobile Excel experience (if you’re minded to view or work on spreadsheets on your phone)and should make for an easier transition to remote working for die-hard Windows users.