Julie’s gadget diary – I’m one step closer to using an Android device as my main travel computer

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. By that definition, I’m insane because I continue to look for ways to turn a tablet or even my smartphone into my primary all in one computer. Why would I even want try that? Because I’m The Gadgeteer, that’s why.

Seriously, though, ever since the early days of the Palm Pilot PDA, I have dreamt about one handheld device that would function as my phone, my camera, my laptop, and my desktop computer. I know that we keep getting closer to this reality, but we’re not quite there yet. But, that hasn’t stopped me from trying again and again. And as you’ve read in some of my previous gadget diary posts, I can’t seem to let go of the dream so I’m going to ask all of you out there to help me figure out if it’s really possible or if I should finally give up and shut up about it.

Why do I want one device?

Last week I read two articles that brought these one device feelings back to the surface for me:

The 5 stages of Chromebook acceptance and Kyle Lambert made his illustration career on the iPad.

The reasons why I keep wanting to use only one device is that I’m into minimalism and I think it would be great to be able to fit all of my computing and product photography gear into my pocket. This would simplify and significantly lighten my load when I travel and would allow me to work anywhere and anytime. Besides those reasons, there’s the challenge of trying to find a way to make it work.

My biggest road block that had been tripping me up in the past was a way to use the desktop version of Gmail on my phone or tablet so that I can easily file and label emails and work in my multiple inbox setup. I kept trying to get the desktop version of the site using Chrome which was a disappointment. But Firefox, on the other hand, does work.

With the desktop Gmail site, I can keep my email nice and tidy by filing with the one of 100’s, if not 1000’s of tags that I use to keep my mail organized and my inbox at a manageable size.

But now I’m trying to solve another problem. Batch renaming images to fit the file naming convention that I use for reviews. If I’m traveling and snapping images with my phone that I want to use in a Gadgeteer post, I don’t want to just upload the images directly to the site because they will be too large of a resolution and they will have a default file name that does not identify the images in a human readable format.

In a perfect world, Google Drive would have a batch file rename feature since the images I take with my phone’s camera automatically get backed up to my Google Drive account. I know that I can individually rename images inside Google Drive or even with a file manager on my phone, but that gets tedious. I’ve tried several batch rename apps for Android, but so far none of the ones I’ve tried will let me rename multiple files at one time using a format like company-product-#.jpg where the # gets replaced with an incremented count like apple-iphone-1.jpg, apple-iphone-2.jpg, apple-iphone-3.jpg and so on.

I’ll continue to look for a solution, but if any of you out there already know how to do this, please share your ideas in the comments below.

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Tagged: gadget diary

Julie’s gadget diary – I’m one step closer to using an Android device as my main travel computer originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on February 12, 2017 at 3:47 pm.

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Julie’s gadget diary – I’m one step closer to using an Android device as my main travel computer