A Laptop That Fits on Your Hip -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 2/16/2001
Last Visited: 8/8/2002
David Brodie, senior vice president of Wohlsen Construction Company, Lancaster, Pa., who also sits on Airput's advisory board, believes that cell phone-based applications will be readily embraced by the construction industry.Ten years ago, Wohlsen, an ENR Top 400 firm servicing the mid-Atlantic region, was banking on each site superintendent having a laptop in his trailer for entering daily logs, filing reports and doing project costing."That still hasn't happened," Brodie says.Today, most Wohlsen superintendents fill out paper timesheets and drive them to a central office where someone keys that information into the computer.While slow to use laptops, superintendents have quickly adopted mobile phones, "and at such a rate that they're asking us if we're going to get the Web-enabled phones," says Brodie.He sees wireless phones as inexpensive substitutes for laptop computers, especially for the types of functions he thought Wohlsen superintendents would be doing by now via laptop.
This Nextel smart phone features a five line, 16 character display and connects to the Web in about three seconds.