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.

Update July 6th 2011.

So a year has passed. I have not had a telephone data bill for 11 months. I’ve had an iPad and sold it again because it really was too heavy to hold and too uncomfortable to use. (Sorry millions of users). I’ve had a netbook running Joilcloud. And I’ve looked at the Chromebooks which finally came out recently. Chrome OS has not been received warmly, but I like it and could use it, except….the Chromebooks are far too heavy.  So I will be getting a Macbook Air, after the Lion and processor update and subsequent re-release, and spending most of my time on it in the Chrome browser, connected via wifi.