Smartphones are supposed to be the next big wave but I can’t get myself to be productive on them. Every action takes an order of magnitude longer than it would on a regular computer which prevents from me from starting it in the first place. The challenge is that I’m a power user on a computer able to leverage shortcuts across a variety of programs to be extremely productive. The cost is that when I switch to a phone it’s impossible for me to attain that level of speed which is extremely frustrating.

I see that others are spending a ton of time on their phones and are using it to replace a variety of activities they’d normally do on a full fledged computer but I’m not able to do the same. I wonder what impact this has. Smartphones are great for consumption but I wonder whether they actually improve people’s productivity. It’s much better than not having any digital device and is definitely helping get more people digitally connected but I can’t imagine them replacing actual computers in the short term. What will make smartphones more productive is when they start understanding our intent and predicting what we actually want to do. Something akin to Google Now but instead of showing us what we want to see allowing us to create what we want to create.