I don’t mind admitting it: I love the productivity that comes with being able to do my work wherever I happen to be. Twenty years ago, when I started working away from a “regular” office, it was a much different story; laptop computers tended to be heavy, wireless networking was still a dream for most folks, and finding a phone jack to plug into was as important as an electrical outlet. Now, of course, things are different.

One of the huge differences lies in the smallest platforms. I’m using my iPhone for more and more tasks, though I can’t honestly see if replacing my laptop. The reason I’ll keep the laptop around has a lot to do with screen size and keyboard capability — I need more in both areas than any phone is going to deliver. From a pure application point of view, though, the iPhone is rapidly moving forward. I can now look at the iPhone as a reasonable internet adjunct to the laptop that is my main system.

Using the iPhone as a business platform brings many opportunities, but it brings lots of challenges, as well. One of the most important of these is security — not so much what happens if someone listens to my conversation, but what happens if I leave the iPhone on a table in a coffee shop, or someone takes it out of my bag. This is a very real concern for many individuals and organizations, and I don’t know of a great solution ( aside from remembering to pick up my phone when I leave the table). It’s not such a huge deal for me, but I can imagine scenarios that involve full-device encryption and remote device erasure.

Security has been a very real issue for mobile devices ever since they first began to be used for business, and the idea still find resonance with business users today. In my case, I have backups from today for both my phone and laptop, and regularly move data off the laptop onto hard disks that tend to stay in my office. Is it comprehensive security? Nope, but it’s good enough.

The applications that I use most often on the iPhone deal with communications (in Facebook, blogs, email, and twitter), scheduling, and keeping basic records (through a database that synchs with my laptop). One of the things I’ve had to re-learn is the joy of dealing with uni-tasking applications. I can do one thing at a time, but that’s OK when the one thing is done well and I can ultimately get to all the functions I need.

Do you have a favorite business app on your smartphone? We’d like to hear about it. Would you like a particular app that makes Interop more useful when you’re using your phone? Let us know here and we’ll pass the news along to show management. There’s no question that we’re going to continue to stretch the notion of what’s possible in a cell phone app — we might as well have the ability to do what we need, from wherever we happen to be. It is, as a famous home-improvement celebrity might say, a good thing.

Tags: 2009, 3G, backup

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