[For anyone coming upon this post and wondering about its title, it stems from what I used to call this blog: “The iPhone *is* a PC!”. After awhile, when more and more people were realizing how much of a “real” computer an iPhone can be, I decided to give the blog a simpler name…]
So I haven’t really gotten into any detail regarding this blog’s premise: namely that this little device I’m holding right now could be a stand-in for your full-sized computer. Well consider this: not only can my iPhone “do” email and the Internet, but with the addition of a few (mostly free) so-called ‘apps’, it can also open & view Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and many other kinds of documents. The blog you’re reading is testiment to the device’s web-publishing capabilities, but I can also easily create new text documents. There is even a free dictation app available, so you don’t have to use the touchscreen keyboard if you don’t want to (though I’m surprised how quickly I’ve gotten used to it). And on top of all that, though admittedly it’s a bit kludgey, I can print from the iPhone as well.
For you techies, there are VNC apps that allow you to control your main computer remotely, all kinds of time-tracking & productivity apps, not to mention tons of monitoring utilities that would make any sysadmin happy…
To top things off, as you’ve seen below, the device takes excellent photos, and it can record video as well. There are an astounding number of photo manipulation apps out there, allowing the creation of everything from panoramas to HDR imagery (google it). I plan to post examples of both in the coming days.
In the final analysis, I would challenge anyone to come up with something the average person can do on a desktop computer that can’t be done on an iPhone. And yes, I realize that all so-called ‘smartphones’ can do most of these things, to some degree. In my opinion, however, none can do them as easily, nor as elegantly, as the iPhone.