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My mobile tech situation keeps on changing. Most recently, my 6-year-old MSi laptop has simply stopped charging or booting at all…and to my surprise, I find that I don’t really miss it. Honestly, I’d been using it less and less lately, and my Nexus and other mobile devices from my gadget bag more and more. The one thing I had really needed, or thought I needed, the laptop for was blogging, with the ever-aging Microsoft Live Writer–but then it occurred to me that I hadn’t ever tried blogging with the native Android WordPress client. What might that be like?

As it happened, it was easy enough to find out. I used the WordPress client to write and share a recent post about web advertising, from start to finish, with the assistance of my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. It turned out that it was relatively simple. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call it easy, but I could manage to do just about everything that was necessary to get a post up that way. Having done it once, I’m now doing it again–I started this post while I was waiting for breakfast at a local cafe, then continued it from my local public library a little later. I’m sitting at a table in the public library’s “tech center” typing it right now, in fact.

The biggest drawbacks had to do with inserting links and images. The way that copying and pasting works on Android is built around tapping, not clicking. Android simply doesn’t understand “right-clicking,” after all. Any links I put in this post, I have to swap over to the web browser, Google up, copy, then come back over here, mark the text, hit the “link” icon, and paste into place. What takes a few seconds on my PC is a thirty-second operation here, though I have found I’ve been able to cut the time down a little as I get better at it. (It would be easier if I had a reliable Windows tablet and could run Live Writer on it, of course. Maybe sometime I’ll snag one that doesn’t fizzle as soon as I get it. Who knows, maybe even that $20 one David mentioned a few days ago might be worth a look for just that one purpose.)

And when I insert the photo that you saw at the top of this post (that I haven’t yet taken as I write this), I’ll have to snap it on my phone, then let it back up to my Google account, then insert it by telling WordPress to grab it from the photos app. I might even have to save it to Dropbox and grab it from there if that doesn’t work. It’s complicated.

But on the other hand, it also means that I can post to TeleRead when I’m visiting family two states away next weekend. It’s not outright impossible, just a little more difficult than usual. With my Karma Go, I might even be able to blog from the passenger seat as my sister-in-law drives me and her kids cross-country. And it means I won’t have to worry about trucking along a heavy, bulky laptop computer and accessories that I’d only need for one purpose anyway. So, all in all, being able to blog from my Nexus 7 seems like a pretty good thing right now.

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