… those that backup and those who will.
Thanks to Mark Hurst, Bit Literacy.
Seriously, you need to be backing up on a continuous basis now, especially if you travel. Sync is the start, but you also need to be backing up one of your sync points at least once a day.
With the cost of computer hardware today and the availability of file and folder sync solutions, it makes great sense to always have a second backup laptop available to you at all times such you can alternate or switch between them based on the emergency (machine is dead) to the having a larger presentation laptop and a smaller travel laptop. The sync solutions that work well for me are Microsoft Live Mesh and the Insync solution with Google Docs. Both of these solutions allow you to setup sub folders of your Documents folder as a complete file store that is synchronised to the other machine(s). In the past I have used the sync solutions to provide full files/folder backup and recovery for moving to a new laptop, but with the large amount of data I now sync that has sometimes taken me up to a week to get back and in operation. I see it now as a much better solution to always have two machines on the go simultaneously.
Live Mesh is more flexible in allowing you to have multiple folders all over your machine that you set to sync across all machines, but it does not offer much cloud storage (5GB but you can peer to peer sync without going to this storage) and there are mild rumours that with the coming Windows 8 that it will be ceased. This has proven very reliable for my situation where I have been syncing 80-120GB across three machines but I am not sure I will be sticking with it.
Insync is a much more interesting tool that allows you to use the universal storage nature of Google Docs to sync all your machines to Google Docs, and due to the low cost of Google’s storage ( free for 1GB, $5 for 20GB, $20 for 80GB, $4,096 for 16TB! per annum) you have ultimately unlimited storage. This service also allows you to share individual files and folders using the sharing functionality of Google Docs, and your remote and mobile access is via standard Google Docs on whatever device. I can see me transitioning to Insync only in the coming months.
Email is just a matter of using a webmail solution or one that offers full sync or IMAP to a PC client such as hosted Exchange solutions (Office365) or ,my favourite at the moment, Google Mail for Apps. Both of those solutions offer a complete storage solution for all your email, contacts and calendaring needs. Google offers more capabilities in being able to share calendars with people outside of your organisation and having access to some very interesting Google Apps platforms solutions such as CRM. Microsoft is definitely more behind in that side of things, and way more costly.
On top of that, using Google Chrome with full browser sync also makes sure that every bookmark and extension is synchronised to every machine I use. The final piece of the puzzle is the use of Lastpass to ensure that I have secure access to every password that I need.
So you have no excuse but to have access to a laptop with all of your data, all of the time, and even have access to your data in the cloud.
The launch of the new iPad (sometimes referred to as iPad3) has given the tablet form factor an absolute brilliant piece of functionality – the Retina display, a screen with a higher resolution than a HD TV. This is revolutionary and will greatly impact new Tablets being released during the coming two years. It will also have an effect on the laptop market, where we are already seeing 1920×1080 resolutions on the 13″/15″ laptops, particularly with the new Ultrabooks.
My first 12.1″ laptop in modern times from 2006 had a 1280×800 resolution screen. My current 11.6″ laptop has a 1366×768 pixel screen, thus giving realistically no difference in quality from the last 6 years. Ultrabooks with this form factor are still sitting at 1366×768 to my dismay.
What I am looking forward to is 1920×1080 or even higher panels being used on the 11.6″/12.1″ form factor, not as a way to provide more screen real estate, but as a way of increasing the visual quality. I really believe that by the end of 2012 there will be laptops with these screen resolutions appearing in stores, and I will be first in the queue to get one.
Cannot wait.
A little over 4 years ago I bought an Asus PC701 4G Netbook. It was small, light, and did the job… well mostly. I struggled with the inability to have Outlook on a Linux based PC and I really needed Outlook. I upgraded to Windows XP and it all worked out well enough. At least for a secondary machine that is. In the end, that little SSD died and I upgraded to my next netbook – one that I actually used as my main machine for quite some time, a rebadged MSI Wind U100. This one was more sprightly running as it did an Atom processor with an (upgraded) 2GB of RAM, and an (upgraded) 160GB HDD. I could do everything on that little machine, even running Windows 7 Premium Home as soon as that came out. It is still a fine machine, if a little sluggish at times but with excellent battery life running above a real 4 hours.
Since then I have moved away from those little netbooks to my current Ultralight machines (a 13″ Asus UL30 and an 11.6″ HP DM1), but those machines owe quite a bit to those early netbooks, which in my view leads very much into today’s Ultrabooks. Netbooks identified the following very important requirements for a laptop – it had to have good to excellent battery life, be very light, have enough storage and sufficient performance. Those little Atom based machines have sufficient performance for browsing, a little wordprocessing, email and playing music – exactly what the average family need in laptops that are owned by every member of the family, and in fact what most busy business travellers also needed. All of these features have made their way into pretty much every single 11.6″ and 13″ based laptop today. Netbooks also helped greatly in the removal of the need to have an optical drive, so much so that very few actual machines these days have built in optical storage and most people don’t miss that except about twice a year, when a separate drive can be used.
Unfortunately things have moved on in the processor stakes, the memory stakes and the required workload stakes. Netbooks as they are today have not moved on except in the growth of the 11.6″ based ultra light laptop which also corrects the other main problem of netbooks – the manufacturers margins. The new “netbook” is the 11.6″ ultralight running Windows 7 Premium Home with 4GB of RAM, 320GB of HDD, a 1366×768 screen, and most importantly a dual core processor that is also ultra low power to give 5 to 6 hours of battery life for normal use.
So I do agree Netbooks have died but they begat some very interesting children. Without Netbooks we would all still be paying £600/$750 for a 14″ monster with 2 hours of battery life. Be thankful for Netbooks.
The main thing that defines a laptop these days is how big it is, and the thing that defines that more than anything else is the screen size. It used to be the fact that every laptop had a 15” screen but the smaller device has grown more popular and it is easy to see why – what point is a mobile device if it huge, even though you can get 17” screen laptops that act as desktop replacements.
The big change tor many was the introduction of the ‘netbook’ which through in mostly 10.1” screens with some smaller ones at 8.9” or right the way down to the original EeePC 4G with 7”. These screens really made laptops extremely portable, and I believe it is the big reason for the growth in laptop ownership amongst ordinary people – as people saw that they could always have a laptop with then when it was a tiny ultra portable machine. However these screens are almost entirely only 1024×600 pixels in size which has been a major problem with Netbooks and I believe the main driver to their reduction in popularly in recent months (along with tablets coming to the fore of course). The problem being that applications expect a minimum of 1024×768 pixels or more specifically at least 768 pixels in the vertical.
In the last 18 months, screen sizes grew into the more manageable 11.6” to 13.3” size ranges and these have been mostly available in 1366×768 pixels in size (or the less popular 1280×800 or 1280×720). For the smaller screen this resolution is a very effective size but in my opinion way too small for the larger 13.3” size screens. Apple lead the way and the new Ultrabooks are following up by introducing 1440 x 900 pixels for these 13.3” sizes, and more effective number of pixels for these sizes.
The combinations of pixels and screen size actually points to the tradeoffs between portability and ensuring you have an effective screen size for applications. I find that for the ultra traveller you need to focus on having a small laptop which is why I have the 11.6” 1366×768 pixels based device and this is great on the go (can open when in economy on planes) and ok when I have arrived, particularly if I am a regular traveller and have organised a second monitor at my destination. I do however keep a 13.3” based machine running which works real well when combined with a decent 7” or 9” tablet for use when the 13.3” screen is impossible to use.
What about you?
There has been some focus on Google’s failures of last year and they included the Google Chromebook in that. I am not going to argue that they are wrong – they are very right. The Chromebooks are not capturing the public imagination and are making their way into the niche arenas of people who have the most important requirements as being complete security and cloud storage. – in other words almost no one.
The key problem is that when customers are looking for a general purpose computing solution, they are very happy with a full featured laptop and spending £200 to £400 is ok with them as long as it does have flexibility. Chromebooks do not have that flexibility and were being sold at the upper end of the price range that the vast majority of ordinary people want to spend. In other words, they are stupidly expensive and do too little.
The niche below the general purpose computing solution is being happily filled by most people by either smartphone or low cost tablet and ultimately Chromebooks will need to gain features that normal laptops have or they will disappear via a slow death in my view.
Last March, when the iPad 2 was released, Steve Jobs described it as a Post PC device. Rather scathingly I could not agree to that as under iOS4 you still needed to activate it using iTunes and a PC of Windows or OSX flavours. The promise was that once iOS5 was available, this would be solved and the iPad would be standalone and be truly a Post PC device.
Well iOS5 came along and it is true that you can activate the device without a PC and make use of iCloud to backup your content and do most things without a PC, but if you do not have a PC then you have lost much functionality for managing your content. Primarily the iPad (or iPhone for that matter) needs to connect to a PC over WiFi to sync content, particularly Podcast audio or video content, where you have to go and get it rather than have it delivered. Since last March, I have moved on Android devices to get that standalone device, and I can say I have pretty much achieved it as I have phone and tablet devices which auto subscribe to audio and video feeds, and give me direct access to home content via DLNA and access to files via online file stores such as Dropbox or Box. So Android of any sort above 2.3 gives you that PC-less experience that was so pushed last March by Apple and they have not yet succeeded in delivering.
I also have to say, I don’t think this sort of device is Post PC in the truest sense of the term – PC stands for Personal Computer. It has become a way of describing a device with a keyboard, a screen and a central processing box. I think the term has to be taken back to its original meaning - a personal computer. In that context, my Smartphone is a PC device… my Tablet is a PC device… my Laptop is a PC device. Post PC devices are actually PC devices where PC stands for a personal computer device and they are all PCs.
I have talked about this before, but this article has reminded me and I am passing it on to every reader of this blog…
The New Year is upon us, and you might be partaking in the tradition of making a resolution for the coming year. This year, why not make a resolution to protect your data privacy with one of the most powerful tools available? Commit to full disk encryption on each of your computers.
This is particularly important for those of you who engage in serious travel with the high risk that your machine can be lost with the resultant risk to yours and your client’s data. Remember to pair this with a serious near real-time data backup/sync solution and strong passwords.
There are no excuses any more.
Just wish that there was a similar solution for my tablet and phone… I just have to rely on remote lock and wipe for those. Still looking for whole device encryption.
I do not always follow every iDevice rumour but the one I do hope would come true (and not just for iDevices) is extending battery life further.
High End Version of New iPads Get Extra Battery Life
Reports are coming in that Apple will be unveiling two versions of iPad3 this early 2012, one for the high-end segment and one for the mid-range segment. One rumored improvement of these new devices over their predecessor is longer battery span, which will be increased to 14,000mAH.
This rumour is probably absolute nonsense but I hope device designers out there really start to focus on battery life as a primary feature of a mobile device, and not as a secondary one. Devices need to be able to run through a heavy working day with some spare capacity without the need for me to carry my trusty recharger.
Trawling the bargain bins should start right now, particularly if you are after a decent 7″ tablet. The Dell Streak 7″ has been terminated with extreme prejudice by Dell but there are quite a few still out there and it is well worth the £159 (in airports) to £200 (in stores) price, particularly because of …
Though they all come in Android 2.2 flavor, you can upgrade it to Android 3.2
The screen at 800×600 is not the biggest in the world but it does work well enough, I am almost tempted myself (whilst I wait for my HTC Flyer Honeycombe 3.2 upgrade in the coming days).