So I spent the whole of last week travelling around Australia on the Note 4 Roadtrip, seeing if I could do my job using only a smartphone. What lessons did I learn and how can you adapt those strategies?

On Monday, I'll do a detailed roundup of what I learned during the Note 4 Roadtrip, and the tips every business traveller can glean from the experience. Meanwhile, here are 10 random things I discovered along the way.

My main working device during the
Note 4 Roadtrip challenge is (obviously) the Note 4, but I also have a Gear S smartwatch strapped to my wrist. Its big achievement for the week? Turning me into the kind of person who worries about my daily step count.

The most obvious trend in smartphones in 2014 has been big screens, and the 5.7-inch display on the Note 4 continues the theme. From a productivity standpoint, what are the benefits of that approach when tackling a challenge like the Note 4 Roadtrip?

After my post yesterday discussing my experience typing on the Note 4 and selecting text, several commenters asked why I wasn't using the S Pen stylus for that task. In truth, it had been a little neglected, so I set myself to properly exploring its text input possibilities.

On a basic level, I type for a living. I type stories and edit other people's stories and type emails and type interview notes and type proposals and reports and tweets. And all this week I am doing that without an actual physical keyboard, with the Note 4

On a normal working day, I wake up stupidly early,get out of bed and immediately switch on my computer to check what has happened overnight. But this week my Note 4 is my computer, so I can cut out one step -- I don't need to get out of bed.

I was so pleased with the fact that I didn't have to pull a laptop out of my bag at Newcastle Airport that I completely forgot I had a smartwatch on my wrist. My phone and wallet went in the tray, my bag and tray went on the conveyer and I stepped towards the security scanner without a care in the world.

One of the aspects of the Note 4 Roadtrip which always worried me was how I was going to handle writing 1700 words or more a day for the NaNoWriMo novel-writing challenge. The answer turned out to be voice recognition.

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.