Stop thinking about the gadget, it means NOTHING
I see this time and time and time again on the various paperless, productivity and GTD mailing lists, forums and blogs I'm either on, or read on a regular basis.
The device means NOTHING. Seriously, stop thinking about it.
There's all this worry about the OS version, the device speed, the ability to get to this app store or that app store or whatever. Irrelevant!
If the device does what you want, and is
transparent in your workflow, then you can continue on with your day, "cranking widgets" and slicing through your projects like a ninja.
It's only when the device
fails to meet your needs, that you start exploring the innards, upgrading the OS, installing new programs and so on.
Productivity Pr0n... don't fall for it!
What
matters, is your data. How you manage, manipulate, sync and maintain your data. The OP is right, it's not about RIM or iOS or Android or any of that, it's about whether or not your data is still accessible
outside the system you use, or on
other systems concurrently (and I'm not talking about Dropbox here [rife with their own disastrous deceit and security holes]).
If you can get your data
off the device,
off the system into another system, then the device is simply a "portal", or a transport mechanism between other systems.
It's a tool, like a knife. You use the knife to cut your meat, but you don't care what kind of metal it is made of, what its tensile strength is, how it was forged.. what you care about, is whether it can continue to slice your meat (or your vegetables, if you're vegan) quickly and efficiently.
When I'm using my device and installing my apps, the first thing I think of is, "If I put my data into this app, how do I get it out
outside of this system..?"
This is
critical, because if your data is locked up in an app that exists
only on the device itself, inside a proprietary app that has no way to "sync" or transport that data out so it can be managed elsewhere, you're limiting yourself, and eventually
will have to duplicate that data in another system, typing it all in by hand or exporting it in some other fashion. Not fun.
Right now, this is a
major issue with the BlackBerry PlayBook. I did a
pretty lengthy and detailed writeup on the number of bugs I found in just the first two hours. One of the biggest problems is that any data entered
on the PlayBook itself, is stuck there, forever. There is no way to get at the data, get it out, sync it elsewhere. Nothing. Also, with no native apps and no way to get the data stored in those apps back to the desktop or cloud, the system becomes a pretty singular-use black box device.
In short, don't think about the device as the endpoint... it's just vehicle to get you there. The endpoint is managing your data, whether that be on paper, digital, stone tablets or otherwise. The
data is what matters, not the gadget you use to look at it.