Note 4 Roadtrip: Quiet, Qualms And Qantas

So here’s an advantage of working on a smartphone I hadn’t thought of: you can use it entirely silently in the quiet carriage of a train and feel no guilt. Whenever I’ve used a keyboard (and I travel on long-distance trains quite a lot), I’m conscious of trying to avoid noisy typing.

That isn’t the main purpose of the trip from our offices in Circular Quay to Wickham in the centre of Newcastle. The trip takes three hours and I want to see how the Note 4 battery holds up over that time, especially as the signal strength varies a lot on that route.

I start with 100 per cent battery in Sydney and when I hit Newcastle, it’s on 40 per cent — and that is with continuous connected use. So no power panic just yet, but something to keep an eye on. Journey bonus: we actually stopped at Wondabyne, one of the best-known examples of a midget station, which makes me happy.

Work itself is progressing well. My main tools of the trade are Chrome, email and Google Docs, which is quite a close replica of what I would do on a PC. For writing purposes I would normally use Word, and I might sample the Android version later in the week, but since Android Word doesn’t support macros, the benefits will be less obvious, I suspect.

In the Lifehacker office, there is something undeniably strange about my working at an otherwise largely empty standing desk. I eventually realise what it is: I don’t actually need the desk at all. Provided I stand with correct posture, I can act as if I have a standing desk everywhere.

Meanwhile, there’s the Gear S vibrating occasionally on my wrist. I decided it wasn’t good form to check it while in a barber’s chair having my hair cut first thing this morning. It was quite pleasing when it told me I had hit my 10,000 step target halfway through the day.

The most useful notification it gave me was from the Qantas app, pointing out that check-in for my flight on Tuesday had opened. One tap on the watch and the check-in opened on my phone. Useful as a reminder.

And so I’m in Newcastle for the night, and facing a different challenge: writing a big chunk of text for my NaNoWriMo novel. I’ll tell you how that went tomorrow.

Lifehacker’s Note 4 Roadtrip series is sponsored by Samsung.