Mobile Email is Not Optional. June 27th, 2009
I am taking a stand here against most people. I hereby declare that if you are “out,” you should still be receiving emails. I don´t give a damn about your delays and errands. At least read my urgent note. I suspect that people will declare me incorrect, send a text they say. I can hear them. Hear me out.
If we are close enough to text, I probably don’t email you in the first place. I’ll send you a damned text. And, emails and texts are vastly different: texts cap out at 160 characters (about little poke past what Twitter allows). Thats a non-starter. I could call, but ringing your phone is an annoyance for us both, and you are probably occupied.
Now, perhaps right now you do not, say, have mobile email. Let’s start with that. What type of phone do you have? Acceptable answers: iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre (soon), I’m too broke to have a cell phone. Now the only person that cannot give an acceptable answer is a person with a cell phone that is ghetto.
Get over your crappy clamshell RAZR. Those went of fashion like Columbus.
Alright, but why is mobile email so important? It just hit me walking the terminal of the Denver airport (great place, free wifi), after my flight was delayed for an hour. I had been incommunicado for the two hours before due to the fact that I was in a flying tube at 36,000 feet. We hit dirt, and I popped out my iPhone, received my 27 new messages and scanned through them. Of the 27, six were important enough for me to read, and of those six, three had action items for me.
If my flight had not been delayed, I would not have had the time to pull out my laptop and handle those tasks. But, I would have seen the emails and on the plane started to work on them. This is about speed. You are not moving fast enough. I am you. Not having access to a serious phone (email, browsing, Twitter, etc) means that for 99% of the people you talk you are dead the moment you get up from your chair.
People talk about convergence, and connectivity. Bullshit. Most people just wander out the door and off the map. You are too slow. Get a better damn phone and use it.
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