No, I don’t mean by sight, where you can see the geek in a coffee house hunched over his mobile phone typing frantically on the thumb keyboard. I mean how to spot a mobile device geek from a distance, even from across the globe. It’s easy to do if you know what to look for and to prove it I took a trip through my Sent Items folder in Outlook and some of my IM chat logs. What I found is that I can tell what device I was using by the contents of my email replies. Here’s an example of an email reply I entered while at a full size keyboard:
Thanks for sending me the information I requested about your product. It looks very innovative and I look forward to receiving additional information so I can keep informed of your progress. I am always looking for new products and yours is very intriguing to say the least. Please add me to your notification list for future product updates.
Best regards,
James Kendrick
I can tell from the email content that I was sitting at my desk using my Tablet PC in the dock with a full wireless keyboard and mouse available. Here’s an email I sent in a similar situation from my Palm Treo 700w using the integrated thumbboard:
Jason, Will do. Thanks for the info. Best, James
The difference is obvious, isn’t it? The fact is that workaround keyboards which can include thumb keyboards and on-screen keyboards can affect the quality of the correspondence that mobile workers send to others. I found that in almost every case my emails created on the Treo are short and terse as if my intent was to "get in and out" as quickly as possible (which it was). This is no surprise because I find that keyboard uncomfortable and slow to use but even so, it was a bit of a shock to me to see how much worse my replies are compared to those created with a full keyboard.
Note that I include my ThinkOutside Bluetooth keyboard in the full keyboard category because it comes very close to duplicating a "real" keyboard, whether I am using it with the Treo or the Sony U71. Emails that I know for a fact were created using the ThinkOutside keyboard are indistinguishable from those created at the desk. I use the pen to create a lot of emails on the Tablet PC and it makes it easy to enter a fair bit of text quickly so those emails are harder to spot. I can tell you for sure that any email that contains a lot of entered text almost certainly came from a full keyboard. This is one reason why I think that early adopters of the Origami/ UMPC devices and other ultra-portables like the OQO need to get a portable keyboard if they don’t want their device compromise (and they all do in one area or another) to show through to those they deal with.
So the next time you receive a terse email from someone you know is a mobile device user, you can bet they weren’t sitting at their desk when they sent it. You mobile device users, have a look at your sent emails and see if you can spot which ones you sent via a "virtual" keyboard. I’m betting you can so think about what that says about you to the ones with whom you correspond.
-jk
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