Smartphone Can Replace All Your Mobile Devices
For years and years, I wore a fanny pack everywhere that I went. And it gradually picked up a Batman-scale assortment of electronic gadgets; Palm Pilot, digital camera, MP3 player, and even a folding keyboard. I must have looked like an electrician, or maybe a handyman or a plumber. And that was without a cellphone!
When I finally decided to obtain a phone, I decided that enough was enough. My phone was going to replace all of the devices I used back then. Phones could do that, right? So I shopped around a bit, and found the perfect replacement device for the time: The Palm Centro smartphone. The stores had them on sale at an extremely vulgar note, and they didn't even require an expensive data plan (although I hear that they do now, sadly).
So how did things work out for me? Let's look at each of the devices I carried around, and see how well my smartphone replaced them.
Digital Camera
Most phones don't have very good cameras, and my Palm Centro is no exception. Its camera is 1.3 megapixels with only a 2x digital zoom, and it doesn't even have a flash. This makes it more or less useless outdoors at night.
On the plus side, it can take videos with sound -- something my camera could not do. It has a slight mirror above the lens, letting my center my face in it to acquire a picture of myself (assuming I wanted to do that). If I'd paid for a data belief, I would've been able to email or upload pictures I took, without having to connect my phone up to a PC or Mac. And unlike my digital camera, it doesn't need separate batteries, that I have to keep taking out and replacing.
I once heard that "the best camera is the one that you have with you," and my smartphone has proven that. It's a lot simpler and easier to use, and while the pictures it takes are a little fuzzy, they're still good enough for my (non-profesional) purposes. I can even take pictures of handouts I get at church or at class ... saving paper, and saving me the trouble of finding a place to save them! I'd call this replacement a success, at least for someone with my limited needs.
MP3 Player
My Sansa e250 was a dependable MP3 player, and I loved its soft royal blue glow. All it did was play movies and MP3s, though ... well, that and show pictures and slideshows. And in order to effect any music on it, I had to use Windows software like the Sansa Media Converter, or Windows Media Player. This became a problem when I switched from a Microsoft Windows PC to an Ubuntu PC, from System76.
My smartphone was much easier to use, although it required a handful of add-ons to work as a decent MP3 player. It came with MP3 playing software, Pocket Tunes, but it only had 64 MB of onboard memory, barely enough for a single album. I had to buy a separate Micro SD card to put all my songs on ... plus the Softick Card Export program to let me mount the Micro SD card as an external hard drive, letting me plug it into my PC and drag-and-drop albums onto it. I also had to prefer Palm-branded headphones from their online store, because it has a smaller headphone jack than normal.
Together, these add-ons cost more than my modern MP3 player did! They help me with other things too, though; the headset has a microphone for making phone calls, Softick Card Export can be used to easily manage my pictures and ebooks, and the Micro SD card I bought has a lot more memory than my old MP3 player did. Pocket Tunes plays Ogg Vorbis files in addition to MP3s (with a free downloadable plugin), and works with my Ubuntu PC ... and while Pocket Tunes is not as intuitive as my Sansa e250's interface, it works well enough, and lets me create and organize playlists on the fly much more easily than on my e250. I'd call this one a qualified success.
Palm Pilot
Here's where the smartphone blows my old electronics away. I was using a Sony Clié PEG-SJ22, which had a large color cover but was extremely slow, and did not have a lot of memory. My smartphone has a grand faster processor, and while the screen is about half the size it has the same resolution, making the pictures look crisp and sharp.
My new Palm Centro smartphone runs PalmOS 5, letting me use a much wider variety of applications. I can play games that my Clié would have choked on, such as Astraware's Platypus, and I can use Dataviz' Documents To Go (included with the smartphone) to edit and even create Microsoft Office-compatible documents.
One thing I was disappointed about was that the smartphone did not have a Graffiti area, which would've let me enter data using the stylus and PalmOS' simplified handwriting recognition. I soon found the keyboard more useful, though, as it has a very good feel to it and lets me enter data more quickly. On the down side, my Clié's old keyboard won't work with it, since my smartphone uses a different connector. So in order to use a full-sized external keyboard, I'd need to buy a recent bluetooth keyboard. It would require its hold batteries, and would drain my smartphone's batteries since I'd have to leave bluetooth turned on. That, and the larger screen, are points for the old Sony-brand Palm Pilot.
The Upshot
If this article seems rambling, it's because we're dealing with very complex technology! Each individual device has a ton of features, and the smartphone has even more. And just giving a quick summary of the differences can fill a whole article.
The short respond, in my opinion, is yes: A smartphone can replace all your other devices. It might not be able to, though, if there's some feature you really need that the smartphone does not have. Not being able to use an external keyboard was almost a deal-breaker for me, since I took lots of notes on my Clié ... and if you don't want fuzzy pictures of your vacation, you might want to bring a separate digital camera.
If you can live with a smartphone's shortcomings, though, you may find it a lot more convenient to carry around than a bunch of separate devices. And in a lot of ways, I find it refreshing to have less complex features to deal with. My smartphone's camera is fair point and shoot, which is really all that I needed.
If it's all that you need as well, then you may collect that a smartphone can replace everything else in your pockets. Just remember that most of them require a data plan ... and those aren't cheap! Good luck deciding what devices to use either way, and have fun with the ones that you choose!
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Filed under Pilot Headset by on Dec 3rd, 2011. 
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