the-vu

By Jeffrey the Barak

I spend most of my waking hours in front of a 27″ iMac. Not that I’m complaining. When I’m not working, I play here too. But sometimes I have to actually leave my desk and be in other places, and then I sometimes need to be connected and do things that involve Internet.

The background to this dilemma:

I was a latecomer to cellular phones, but once I got one I needed it. For mobile organization, I stayed with various versions of Palm Pilots, from III to TX, for years until one day a few years ago I decided that they were all too small for my poor eyesight and large fingers and said, no more.

The plan was to stay with my simple phone, which at the time was a Motorola Razr, and just be patient for communication. I bought a Macbook so I could work away from home, but it was and is, too heavy to have along all of the time.

My plans were sidetracked when my wife bought me the original iPhone for a gift. I considered returning it for an iPod, but being a Mac-Head, I kept it and got used to it. I even began to use texting sparingly, something I could never do with a numeric telephone keypad. And then mainly because of the headphone socket, I upgrade to a white 16GB iPhone in early 2009.

But now the iPhone is not making me happy. It again seems like a too-small, too hard to use device. Yes it synchs well with Mobile Me and is a portable package containing all my stuff, but I rarely use it unless it’s ringing or I’m too far from a computer. It seems really slow too, not the commonly maligned AT&T connection, which always works for me, but the device itself. It can take ten seconds for it to stop messing around and show me today on the calendar.

I was looking at whether to switch to an Android phone like the nice new larger Droid X, because while I may be a Mac-Head, I’m just as much of a Google-Head, using Google Docs and Gmail as heavily as anyone in the universe. I think Android is very cool, especially for a Gmail, Google Docs kind of guy.

But then I remembered what I almost did before the iPhone appeared in some gift wrap, and I am now thinking the way to go will be to wait for the Google Chrome OS netbbooks to come out, get one with a 3G or 4G data plan, or to avoid a data bill, just wi-fi and exercise some patience between hotspots, and replace the iPhone with a simple telephone-only no-data-plan cellphone designed for old farts.

My iphone contract runs until March 2011, so by then there should be a few Chromebooks around (I’m guessing that may be what we call the Chrome Netbooks that will soon dominate world computing), and some 4G choices.

The iPad is no good for me. I think it’s fantastic, but I never watch movies or play games, and it is awful for Google Spreadsheets and heavy email, so no thanks.

And so I’ll hold off on the switch to Android, or the upgrade to iPhone 4, and think hard about a lightweight Chromebook in a hip bag and a simple phone. I have eight months to flip flop in my head, but I think my mind may be made up. I hope there will be a Chromebook with good screen resolution, solid state storage and enough power for the browser’s demands.

Replace:
Macbook + iPhone

With:
Chromebook + simple mobile telephone.

Next year I’ll look at today’s post and see if I was right.

Jeffrey the Barak shared this idea on 25th July 2010

Update August 20th.

Thanks for the emails but I wish you would go public and post your comments guys!Well here I am, no action taken, but still waiting for Google Chrome. I have been shopping and played with 10.1 inch netbooks. I can see them! I like them! But why oh why do they have that crazy Windows operating system? It’s just so wrong for a netbook, so wrong.Anyway, a curveball. All of a sudden Google Spreadsheets are easily editable on an iPad, which brings that back into consideration. It may not have a keyboard but with practice it works well, and it’s a no risk purchase because you can resell them on eBay with little or no loss. It has no tabbed browser, but it has the similar feature that lets you switch between browser pages.And why not the iPad 3G? Because 3G is too slow and unpleasant to work with except in a dire emergency, and the device costs much more, and you get a data bill for every month during which you want to utilize it.So maybe a $500 16GB wi-fi iPad and a dumb-phone could be the solution. I don’t know, but I’ll update this post when something happens.

Update August 25th.

Today I took out my old Razr and reactivated my phone number on it, effectively turning the iPhone 3G into an iPod Touch. No more data bill! I will be texting (rarely) using Google Voice from now on and the Razr is, well, a non-smart telephone. Nothing more. I’m selling my 3G as we speak and will wait for the Chromebooks to replace it, although I could buy an iPad or a Jolicloud Netbook to play on and resell that later.

By Jeffrey the Barak

I should begin by stating that today is April 8th, 2009. This is important whenever writing about technology, or as in this case, ranting about technology, because by the time you read this, things may well have changed.

I am not a computer journalist, I don’t take advertising revenue from Microsoft or Apple or Norton, and I am no programmer. But I do use computers and I know what I like and do not like.

So this rant is partly an observation, partly a wish list, and partly about 1973 Buick Electra converted to run on battery power. (More on that later).

Ranting about computers, the big kind.

I wrestled with Windows from early 3.0 until late in the XP era, before I became so busy with actual work that I decided it was high time to stop messing around with dialog boxes and virus scans and abandon Microsoft so I could get some bloody work done.

My solution was to switch to Mac. Now I’m not one of these guys who says Apples are perfect and all other fruits are rubbish, because that is an exaggeration, but I will say that I no longer work for the computer. The computer now works for me.

I remain open-minded about where computing may go in the future, but as people who have downgraded to “netbooks” will tell you, there is a future in online application use and assuming being connected continues to become more ubiquitous, that may be our direction.

Ranting about computers, the small kind.

I got into palm-top or handheld computing in the 1990s with a Palm III and dabbled in Windows tablets and then gave it all up when my eyesight deteriorated, only to jump back in when my wife bought me the first iPhone.

I still find Internet use to be a pain in the eye on the iPhone, but I think that on one’s palm is the best place to work in many situations.

But I always wanted to fill the gap between a notebook / laptop computer and a handheld device such as a smart phone. My first attempt at doing so was to buy an Acer tablet computer, but I found the operating system, the hardware and the screen to be very close to completely unusable. It was slow enough to make you scream, awkward to use, and hard to see in almost any light, but only for an hour then the batteries ran down.

I held out hope for Palm’s “Folio Mobile Companion” invention in 2007 only to see them backtrack and cancel the release. And rumors continue to abound about Apple’s plans for something bigger than an iPhone and smaller than a Macbook, with an alternative operating system.

And this is the key, and why the tablet failed for me, something roughly the same size and weight might succeed if it does not try to be a computer. That is: no Windows, no OS X, no full blown Linux, but something more like the iPhone operating system. We have to recognize that a small whatever-you-call-it is not a computer. This is why tablets were awful and also why these new “netbooks” don’t really work well with the Windows OS installed. They come with XP because it’s only about $25 now, but it’s not right for a little ten inch thing.

People who run simple Linux shells to get them online to do stuff get much more satisfaction from their netbooks, without the squinting. It was the same when Palm had two versions of the Trio smart phone, one with Windows Mobile, the big seller, and one with the last version of the Palm OS. The Windows one was terrible because you really need a big screen to work well in Windows. The Palm OS one was less terrible. The little tiny keyboard was never as efficient as Graffiti, if you took the time to learn Graffiti.

The iPhone reminded me that even someone with bad eyes and big fingers can still work in the hand if the OS and also the input method are clever enough, (they are). And as long as there’s an Internet connection, then there is room for a lightweight device that is larger than a pocketable mobile telephone.

Another thing netbooks have done is throw the escalation of processing power and application complication into reverse. This has coincided with the end of the megapixel arms race in digital cameras, and the end of the economic boom, that never should have been a boom in the first place, due to it’s source in hype and debt.

If applications can be usable over the wi-fi, then they will be better if they are less complicated, not more so, so this new small way of thinking can potentially move Microsoft’s fortunes into the hands of Google, Yahoo! etc. Anyone who develops good web-based applications.

Revolutions still to come in display and input technology will add strength to this movement. The tortoise may beat the hare in computing.

So about that electric Buick Electra, oh sorry, I’m out of time.