All in hand

I have just returned from another excellent Handheld Learning conference in London. Because it was a conference focused on handheld technologies, I promised I would do an experiment and see if I could survive for three days without a laptop, and using only my newly acquired iPod Touch. Well, I survived, and some things worked, whilst other things were a little more problematic (the wifi service was second to none, by the way - congratulations to Graham Brown-Martin - pictured - and his team for this).

For example, I was able to Tweet live from the event, firstly with the standard Twitter application on my Safari web browser. A bright young thing then introduced me to EchoFon which I downloaded for free from the iPod App Store. This made my life a lot easier, and I was able to see more clearly what I was tweeting, who was responding to me, and I could also more easily reply, DM and RT other people's tweets. EchoFon used to be known as TwitterFon, and it's designed for mobile phone use, so it was ideal for the task.

Less easy was updating my blog which I found quite difficult. For some reason, Safari would not allow me to modify text once it was saved on Blogger. Not sure why that was, but James Clay showed me how to e-mail direct to my blog, including the posting of images as attachments, which I will try when I can pluck up enough courage.

I was also able to respond to e-mails until someone sent me 13 MB of pictures which clogged my university e-mail inbox, and then I couldn't send or receive anything. I would normally save the pictures onto my laptop, but of course, with only my iPod Touch this wasn't possible. Unless, of course, someone out there knows differently.

My hashtagging wasn't being picked up by the conference feed or Twitter either - someone told me that Echofon has some problems here, but I think there may be a more deep seated problem than that, and I'm sure someone out there has a solution...?

It was an interesting experiment to conduct, and I will do it again for other conferences. It was wonderful to not have to lug my laptop across airport lounges and drag it across London. Oh, what liberty, but at a small price of reduced functionality. More from the conference when I get some time to reflect and post my comments.