On the Inadequacy of Mobile

These days all we hear about is the convergence of desktop and mobile, and we are made to suffer those ugly and cumbersome interfaces like Unity and Metro (or most of you are; I stick to a traditional desktop), where actions you used to take for granted are no longer possible, and someone else has decided what your computing experience will be like.
So on the recent Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Ride, I decided to take only a Nexus 7 and my phone (still using my trusty Galaxy Nexus after all these years). In any case, with most nights being spent at camp sites without power points, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to make my laptop battery last the whole trip, while the tablet and phone could be charged in the support van, either directly or via external battery packs. All we needed to do was take plenty of photos, update the team Facebook page (that was one of the students' job), check e-mail, and write blog posts. My reflections on the experience follow.

First up is the Facebook problem. Actually the problem is not Facebook's, but Android's. The tablet has several generic accounts for primary class use, but since we were going to use Facebook, I decided to create an actual user account for the student in charge of that page. Experience gave me the foresight to set that up in school before the trip, to take advantage of the fast wifi, since I already knew that a new user has to install apps and sync e-mail.
My idea was that we would take photos on one of the generic accounts, and he would log in to his personal account and upload the best ones to Facebook each evening. Cancel that sensible idea. The accounts on Android are invisible to each other and there is no shared file space. The only way to share photos is via the cloud, but we were on limited mobile data that wouldn't even work very well in some of the more remote camp sites. So the unsatisfactory work-around was to leave the student's account unlocked and take all the photos using it. That means five other people regularly logging in to his account and seeing his e-mail notifications, etc.
Next is the problem of the photos themselves. The Nexus 7 was running up-to-date Lollipop (5.1.1, I think). The camera on it is highly simplistic, and has no useful features, such as white balance, exposure, etc. The Galaxy Nexus (running 4.2.2, IIRC) gives way more control over your pictures, though the camera itself is old and inferior. This is a fine example of the way mobile tends to drag us all down to the lowest common denominator. They have made the camera so simple its useless. I have since discovered an app called Open Camera that seems to do the job, and its free and open source. But who would have thought it was needed, when the camera on Android 4 was just fine?
Still on the topic of photos, there are times when you just need to perform a little manipulation, such as cropping or changing the colour levels. I also took a sunrise sequence one morning (on my phone of course) that would have been nice to stitch together. Tasks that would take seconds or minutes with the Gimp on a computer are next to impossible on mobile. Even with an app, a mouse is so much more precise, rapid and powerful than a touch screen.
The lack of a mouse is also the subject of my next criticism. In attempting to write a blog post, I wanted to insert a table to hold the sunrise sequence of photos. Of course I was on my phone, with no cloud-free way to get the pictures onto the tablet, as far as I could tell. The relatively tiny and low-resolution screen made it impossible for me to successfully use such features of Google Sites, on any of the four browsers I have on my phone. After a frustrating experience, I abandoned the blog post for after the trip, when I knew it would take a trivial amount of mouse work on the computer.
And finally, there is typing. Although we can quickly rattle off a text message or short e-mail using the touch screen, writing anything above a couple of paragraphs becomes another frustrating experience. As the length of the post grows, the time wasted increases, and you once again appreciate the inadequacy of mobile. A sentence that takes 10s on the computer may take 20s on touch. You hardly notice the difference. But a paragraph that would take 2 mins on keyboard can take 5 mins on touch, given the slowness not just of the typing, but also of correcting errors. Write several paragraphs, and you really begin to loathe the mobile experience.
This trip has taught me that if you just want to go along with what the device and apps offer you, then mobile is fine. For example using the Facebook app to upload un-processed photos. Once you try to gain control over your work, a computer is a thousand times better.