Big Picture - March 2015 - (Page 14)

inside output Why You Need a Phablet The electronic device that can make work - and life - easier. | by Craig Miller BIG PICTURE March 2015 I n 2011, with the release of the Galaxy Note, Samsung was widely credited with inventing the phablet. What's a phablet? Let's say you plugged your iPhone 5 and your iPad Air into the same charger at night. You wake up in the morning and find a newborn iPhone 6 Plus with its 5.5-inch screen lovingly looking you in the eye. A phablet looks like it could be the offspring of mischief between these two electronic devices. It's a cross between a smartphone and a tablet. I remember the first time a friend showed me his Galaxy Note; I laughed. I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever seen. No one would ever carry around one of those monstrosities. How could you even hold it up to your ear? The laugh is on me. I ordered an iPhone 6 Plus the day they went on sale and dutifully waited until the back orders cleared out. You see, it's my job to have the latest Apple product. One of our other companies, Rapid Applications Development (RAD), is an Apple developer. I reluctantly ordered the 6 Plus over the closer-to-normal-size 6 because of the additional camera features and longer battery life. I figured I could learn to live with its monstrous size. To my surprise, it fit in my front pocket. (I don't recommend this as a back-pocket phone.) What I have found is that the big screen opens up a plethora of new possibilities for what a person in our industry can do with a smartphone. So, I set out to see how many advantages would come from this evolution in phone technology. I'll restrict this column to the Apple product, because that is what I know and have, though nearly everything should be generalizable to similar Android phablets. This column represents the first advantage of a phablet. I am writing it on my iPhone 6 Plus. I can't imagine using my last smaller phone as a word processor. And no, I am not CRAIG MILLER is a principal shareholder in Las Vegas-based Pictographics, (pictographics.net) where he is also director of military and law-enforcement projects. 14 tapping on the screen with my thumbs. I am using one of the little Apple wireless keyboards that come with every Mac we buy for the office. We replace these little keyboards with more serious ones with numeric keypads and function keys on our graphic and CSR workstations, so we always have a few of these little guys lying around collecting dust. They work great for iPads and now phablet iPhones. In addition to these keyboards being a freebie, they only weigh about 11 ounces and are 11.25 x 5.25 inches and very thin. Even smaller ones intended for iPads are available from third party manufacturers. I am writing this using Apple's excellent Pages word processing program that comes free with every iOS and OS X device. The neat thing about Pages is that you can open Word documents in Pages and save Pages documents as .docx files. The same is true for the Numbers spreadsheet program and Excel. The only additional item I needed to complete my phone word processing kit is an Anker multi-angle portable stand for tablets. This unit makes it easy to adjust the screen angle, and it folds flat to go into my briefcase. The screen on the 6 Plus is big enough that it took me by surprise how similar the word processing experience is to that of a dedicated computer. For this last paragraph, I gave my fingers a rest and wrote by dictating to Siri. Cool. http://www.pictographics.net

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Big Picture - March 2015

Big Picture - March 2015
Contents
Insight
Wide Angle
Upfront
Inside Output
Business & Management
Make It Pop
Internet of Places: ISA Preview
Behind the Silver Screen
R+D
Job Log

Big Picture - March 2015