Juggling

It used to be so simple. You had the one PC, stuck in the corner between the desk and the wall, and in order to do whatever you did on the PC back then, play Pacman or Tetris or whatnot, all you needed was to somehow pressure the other one playing Pacman or Tetris or whatnot ot abandon the PC and let you have your turn. This was more or less the case still in the first years of the internet for the masses, up until people started to have the truly peersonal computers, the laptops.

Ok, the same still applies to many, e.g. my kids need to share one laptop. And more often than not, I need to share my iPad or Galaxy Tab with them (for quite a while, I do not intend to get them personal ones just yet), which actually brings us to the topic I originally was going at. The multitude of dedvices to juggle between. When I'm not sharing the gadgets, I more or less find use for each one of them, switching back and forth.

So what's with the juggling? I prefer the Tab when reading a book on Kindle, because it is more lightweight. But then I notice the notification, I have new email. Instead of reading it on the Tab, I set the Tab down and read it on the iPad. Why? Because the Tab does not really do multitasking. I could open the email on top of the book, nut getting back to the book is a strain for the back arrow takes me through the email app instead of taking me back to Kindle.

While I'm at it on the iPad, I check Facebook. There's a video there that I'd like to watch. But darned if I can't play it on the iPad! Decisions decisions, to ditch the book and check the video on the Tab, running the risk that it actually doesn't, or to dig out the laptop from, eh? the daughters' room where she's been playing the Sims on it.

There are so many other examples too, like uploading photos from phone or one of these other mobile devices to Flickr, then needing to open the laptop to organize them fuether. Or pitching a pdf document to dropbox on PC after downloading it from, say, learning center or such, in order to read it more conoveniently on the Tab or iPad. And so on.

So are things more simple with these devices or does the possibility to choose simply make the life with them more complicated? Like with photos streaming from here and there to diifferent folders on the PC, instead of me uploading then from a single camera? I don't know. What I do know, is that none of the devices are good for all things. And the dedvice world is far from being ready. And the instances dealing with all or any ddevice platforms as in internet pages, internet technologies, and applications, are far from perfect.

Probably never will be either, when everybody is pulling their own way, of course.