PC Disappointments

Most of the advantages (and, to be fair, the disadvantages) of working on an iPad are pretty obvious as soon as you start to use one but there are also some more subtle differences, things you might not notice for months or even years. I've been using PCs, in one form or another, since 1994 (before then computers were mostly single-tasking and were not really comparable to today's machines) and Windows PCs have been my primary working tool since I graduated in 1995. How can I so quickly have come to expect my Windows laptop to work the way that the iPad works and to offer the same features? Let me give you an example.

The iPad is basically an Internet communication device; whenever it is connected to the net it will download your email, pick up your messages, look for app updates and so on. This all happens without user intervention and without specific apps being open or active so it's totally invisible to the user. The practical benefit, which will be familiar to anyone with a modern smartphone, is that if you have a 3G connection or if you wander through a wifi hotspot you will immediately have access to your latest email and any emails you wrote since you were last connected to the net will be sent.

The problem comes when you then expect your Windows PC to do something similar. I didn't bother to check my email this morning because I imagined that the file I wanted to work on, which was emailed to me yesterday (I know this because it's sitting, unreadable, on my iPad), would be available for me to access because my laptop had been connected to the Internet yesterday afternoon.

This is clearly nuts. I've always known that PCs need their email clients to be open before they will download email, so how has it been possible for the iPad so quickly to change my expectations? The answer is that background downloading of email, with or without the client being open, is just a much better way of working and to do anything else now seems quaint and antiquated; it is simply natural to expect your connected devices to have ready the things you need to use and any device that doesn't do this feels somehow broken.

So is there an alternative? Can a Windows PC be configured to retrieve email, without having to open Outlook, so that Outlook can then still be used as the primary email client? I haven't ever heard of such a service but I am now actively looking for one.

In this example the elephant in the room, as it were, is the inability of the iPad reliably to open Word 2010 documents, even if you try to import them into Pages. It's not clear to me why Apple hasn't resolved this issue but maybe it's on their 2013 roadmap. Either way, I don't see an immediate solution to my iPad/Windows email confusion, unfortunately.