I just got back from a relaxing week’s vacation on the island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) with my wife and two daughters. In an effort to really relax and be “in the moment,” I decided not to take along my constant traveling companion, my trusty Toshiba laptop. The only technology I brought along was my iPhone: my combination watch, alarm clock, cell phone, email device and Web browser.
I did check to see if AT&T offers coverage in the USVI. Surprisingly, it pretty much blankets St. Thomas, and calls from there to the mainland are considered part of my national coverage plan. So, I wasn’t going into complete withdrawal. But I was eliminating the temptations of a full-size keyboard and a 15-inch screen. It did feel strange walking out of the house without my laptop bag.
We stayed at the Bolongo Bay Beach Resort (www.bolongobay.com), which is on the southern side of St. Thomas. If you’re thinking of visiting St. Thomas, I can highly recommend staying there, at least if you’re looking for tranquility. Bolongo Bay is a relatively small place, with a 1,000-foot-long white sand beach. The temperature while we were there in April was a reliable 82 degrees during the day and 72 degrees at night, with a gentle breeze and the sound of the waves our constant companions when outdoors. The staff is friendly and the food at the Lobster Grille is excellent (the wine list is short but decent by all-but-Sonoma County standards). The resort features all the expected conveniences, including Internet access and free WiFi in the common area (also known as the bar).
What surprised me, at least a little, was how many of my fellow vacationers had toted along their laptops, both Windows and Mac. I even saw a “netbook,” those sub-10-inch email and surfing devices I wrote about in my February column (“Netbooks Hit the Mainstream”). One morning at breakfast, there was a husband and wife in their fifties, sitting side-by-side at one of the square tables, each with their own Dell laptop open in front of them. In the evenings at the bar, there would be several laptops out, with their owners doing who knows what (I was too polite to peek).
I suppose this behavior shouldn’t have come as any surprise. My own entourage had, in addition to my first-generation iPhone, two 3G iPhones, one iPod, two MacBook laptops, three digital cameras (two point-and-shoot plus a Canon SLR), a Toshiba laptop (my wife’s, not mine), a Palm Tungsten PDA and an aged Motorola RAZR cell phone. There was almost a mutiny as my wife packed up her laptop on our day of departure, my daughters and I pointing out that we all wanted Mom to really relax on vacation. Her reply was that she wouldn’t relax if she had to worry about what email she was missing during our week away, and she would find it relaxing to get on top of her inbox and other computer-based stuff. So we withdrew our protest.
My younger daughter used her laptop as an entertainment device, surfing the Web and listening to her vast collection of iTunes. She also read (for the Nth time), Stephenie Meyer’s partially completed Midnight Sun, which retells the Twilight story from the point of view of Edward, the handsome young vampire heartthrob. If you have any vampire-addicted daughters who haven’t read it, you can earn big parent points by directing them to www.stepheniemeyer.com (or just Google the title).
My older daughter checked her email, updated her Facebook page and worked on her equine photography blog (www.AHorseADay.com), generally while sitting at the bar. And my wife checked her email a couple of times, sent a few emails and organized her inbox. As for me, I used my iPhone to check email and surf the Web a bit. And I used it, as I often do, as an “answer machine” to find out the history of the USVI from Wikipedia (we bought all four of them from the Danes for $25 million back in 1917) and locate the names of the small islands we could see from the beach on Google Maps (Buck and Capella, for the record).
I was pretty happy getting along with just my iPhone, but there are definitely some things you can’t do with it. You can’t use one to compose long messages or articles, at least not unless you’re truly a masochist. And I don’t think this is an artifact of the iPhone’s “virtual keyboard,” where you type by touching the screen. It’s just that typing with your thumbs gets tiring. Perhaps my daughters, who’ve grown up texting, would do better, but I’m never going to write my column on anything smaller than a netbook.
You can’t use an iPhone in situations where you really need visual real estate, either. A small business problem cropped up during our vacation. I only needed about five minutes to fix it, but those five minutes required having several windows open simultaneously. So I broke down and borrowed my wife’s laptop to make the fix. If you need visual context, the iPhone’s gorgeous-but-small screen is a real limitation.
My final complaint is that the iPhone doesn’t support Adobe Flash, which means some websites aren’t accessible to me. This lack of support is a philosophical issue, not a technical one. Apple, for whatever reason, hasn’t yet seen fit to license Flash from Adobe for the iPhone—and that limitation is probably the only reason I’d even consider giving up my iPhone for, say, a T-Mobile G1 (the so-called “Google Phone”).
So, what’s the point of this extended travelogue? First of all, “smartphones” like the iPhone make it easy to stay connected to the Internet. There are fewer and fewer places where a cellular data network isn’t available, and a phone is the right size to carry along. Second, getting entirely off the grid may not be as good as it sounds. If you’re curious about your surroundings, having an “answer machine” in your pocket is a tool unlike any in history.
Computers are no longer just for business. As my daughters (and even my wife) demonstrated on our vacation, more and more of our personal life involves digital media (music, photography, even books), and sharing things over the network (email, Twitter, Facebook, texting, blogs).
Even if you don’t take the office along with you—and please try hard not to—vacation will never be the same. And that, as Martha Stewart would say, is a good thing.
