This week I took the plunge and bought an iPhone and I’m pleasantly surprised. No longer do I need to cart my laptop around on holidays, soon to realise that the price of hotel internet is equivalent to daylight robbery. I’d then acknowledge there was no point to having my laptop on the journey at all, unless I wanted to run around looking for free wireless hot spots.

With the vast amount of applications now available for the iPhone, there are now a host of tasks that I can do that simply wasn’t possible on the laptop. So I have to raise the question: how soon will the personal notebook computer as we know it today be totally outdated and obsolete? In order to answer that question, we need to look at what features people require in a handheld portable device vs. a laptop. The iPhone for me means I can check my email and reply with quick responses. I can also update and check my Facebook and Twitter accounts and keep up to date with my Google Calendar. It now has now become my shopping list and diary amongst the long list of its other applications. In most cases it’s all I need to keep connected while I’m out and about and it’s primarily about the convenience factor. It certainly hasn’t replaced my laptop or desktop with tasks such as photo / video editing, writing and blog posting – and that is why the laptop computer cannot be fully replaced.

However powerful and feature rich a handheld device may be, it will always have limitations. Although the iPhone provides an easy way to zoom and move around a page, it is certainly faster to navigate on a larger screen and far less frustrating when surfing the web. Having your typing speeds limited to a single finger rather than having the ability to touch type also has its downsides. The iPhone applications I believe are all designed in mind for the convenience factor, but they cannot completely replace all the exisiting Mac and PC applications.

At the end of the day, the iPhone or other similar devices can be more convenient than the laptop, but this depends on the task that you require to complete. Both these devices are designed for different purposes, so they cannot really be compared. Don’t throw away your laptop just yet!