I’m the kind of person (mac user, usually early adopter) that should have got an iphone. I should probably have gotten one of the first generation for more than one year ago. But all the hype, the apple locks and limitations, that you almost have to “sell your soul” to the operator to get one, that it didn’t have any special new technical functionality that my p1 didn’t already have, I didn’t like the input mode (I like hand written recognition)…

Now we have got one for the persuasive services project to develop some applications. And after one week I was sold. It is just too good, I understood the hype. The app store and the amount of creative things people have made for it just rocks. And with the interface and easiness to use typical of apple.

So what happened with my first 2009 challenge:

>To go completely mobile for all my work & leisure activities. From sending emails, blogging (I’m writing this from my mobile), editing papers…Why mobile? I have the opinion that mobiles are key for sustainability. Not only  they have a small carbon footprint (around 25kg per subscriber and year), but they are the most widely lCT product in the world, ever, 60% of the world population owns one.

Iphone solved all that in one week:

• Email + safari + contacts + calendar. All basic functions works perfectly, in sync with my macbook, they make my life much easier.
• Outpost. Having control over my basecamp account in my mobile was what I was waiting for. Killer app.
• Flickr works beautifully on it.
• Fring for having Skype.
• Tweetie for microblogging.
• WordPress for blogging.
• TouchTerm for having SSH terminal access to my servers and fixing technical things on the go.
• And more, from reading ebooks, to writing notes, to planning routes… And if it’s not there yet probably it will soon.

But there are some questions arising:

1.  Convergence of devices. Iphone is as powerful as many computers, and with telephone capabilities as good as any phone. There is few things I will need a computer to (if I didn’t need to program and such things). Will be follow japan’s lead and abandon computers towards personal mobile devices?

2. What interesting green applications can you do with this toy? I’ll post a list of some applications I have been testing.

3. Hardware sustainability. I feel bad about having still another electronic device. What is the impact of changing electronics so often? What is the real impact to the environment? and for climate change? Is there any possibility to reverse this trend and reduce the impact? how? I’ll try to develop my ideas about this in a following article.

This year I have planned two research related challenges, just to test personally some of my research questions.

The first one is to be able to go completely mobile for all my work & leisure activities. From sending emails, blogging (I’m writing this from my mobile), editing papers…Why mobile? I have the opinion that mobiles are key for sustainability. Not only  they have a small carbon footprint (around 25kg per subscriber and year), but they are the most widely lCT product in the world, ever, 60% of the world population owns one.

My second challenge for this year is to be able to track my exact carbon footprint using ICT tools. Here I’m talking about real accuracy, not your typical web calculator, a number that can give me feedback about my behavioral changes.  One example of this is my Dopplr carbon profile whit the greenhouse gases emissions of all my travelling. Then I have to find out good ways to monitor emissions from the apartment, office, commuting, food, consumption. Let’s see, it’s gonna be scary.

During this year I’ll blog here about my experiences and results around this two personal challenges and the application to my research.