Life with and without a smartphone

I'll have to admit that I do miss my Blackberry Curve. I had the phone for over a year and they are very addictive. Work was paying for it, they bought the phone too. But, budget cutbacks happen. The business has to survive and so what to do?

Cutting back is not always fun. It's easy to point to someone else and say "you don't need that" but I'm like everyone else and I don't like it when it happens to me. But I'm flexable and so what to do?

I enjoyed the calendaring aspects of the phone to keep me on track and at meetings. The integration with Exchange 2007 was great. As I like to point out, it was like having Outlook in my pocket. Contacts, tasks and e-mail were also super handy to have right there.

It's been nearly a month without the phone and the world has not come to an end. My wife is not dissapointed that I'm not checking the dumb thing every few minutes and I'm liking not being bothered with all of the e-mail that comes in.

But, I do miss the calendar. I've started moving a lot of my personal items, e-mail, contacts and calendar off to the cloud, namely Google. Now, I have Google voice and I'm looking forward to using that service. Google calendar offers the ability to SMS text my phone when I have an appointment. This will help me with my temporal issues and keep me at some of my personal meetings. Work, well Outlook is more than happy to bug me.

Thank goodness for the cloud and even with a "dumb" phone, I'm still able to keep my meetings and stay productive.