Best Sales Tool: Smartphone or Notebook?

I've been catching some buzz among the salesfolk community that they're in love with their smartphones. Today's smartphone (whether Iphone, Blackberry or whatever) is now capable of reasonably-sized emails, CRM support, contact management, and even simple presentations (fed through a monitor, natch.)

According to the market research firm Gartner, worldwide smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2008 totaled 32.2 million units, a 29.3 percent increase from the previous year. Not everyone buying these items are sales pros, of course, but I've got a feeling that a lot of sales reps are numbered among the purchasers.

Anyway, the rumor I'm hearing is that some sales reps are going on the road with only their smartphones and leaving their notebooks behind. That sounds a bit weird to me, so I thought I'd run a quick poll, and then give you my opinion on the subject.

[poll id=22]

I'm willing to bet that most sales pros carry both a smartphone and a notebook computer, simply because it's impractical to create documents of any complexity on a smartphone.

I base this guess upon my long experience with small computing devices. I've always been a big fan of small-format devices. For example, I've owned half-a-dozen Windows-compatible notebooks, but none has ever weighed more than 3 lbs. I've also owned a fair number of "personal digital assistants" (PDAs), which are what smartphones used to be called before you could use them to make a telephone call.

For example, back when the Apple Newton came out, I was already carrying a clamshell device that ran DOS (remember DOS?) and had a character cell word processor. Such devices were highly unusual at the time. One trip, I had the tiny computer propped on my lap during a cross-country flight. A stewardess came by, looked down, and said: "That's the smallest one I've ever seen." For some reason I remember that remark. Not sure why.

Anyway, I've also traveled with three Windows CE devices, two of which were clamshells with full keyboards. The one that was a "pocket computer" had an attachable keyboard that allowed me to touch type. However, the screen was so small that it wasn't really all that usable.

And that's my beef with smartphones. Even though you can theoretically get some work done on them, the screen is just too small for doing much more than making phone calls or answer very short email messages. I use mine for that, as well as for photos and playing Scrabble. That's about it.

Any of you readers have thoughts on this? Do you think that smartphones will ever replace notebook computers as the road warrior weapon of choice?