Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Tag Archives: netbook

Full Featured Laptops or Cloudbook

There are a lot of different and new machines out there for the Chromebook to compete with in the portable/ultralight arena. Considering the high price of these machines though, they are certainly priced out of the market in which they would be ideal – the below £200 market. In the £350 to £400 market, they are too limited and extremely expensive, particularly with the lack of ubiquitous network connectivity that will never exist sufficiently unless they can change ChromeOS to work more effectively off-line. The had so much promise. However if you are in the market for a new machine, then take a look at TechRadar’s look at £350 laptops. Considering I have just purchased No.1, the HP Pavilion dm1, on the list as my new primary Ultralight you should certainly find something useful in this article.

 

While Samsungs Google Chromebook is an interesting piece of tech, its not for everyone.

via 10 laptops you can buy for the price of a Chromebook | News | TechRadar UK.

 

 

Incidence of Gadgets

Travelling as much as I do, I have noticed quite a big change over the last decade in the range of gadgets carried by travellers. It used to be the case that you saw most business travellers with their Nokia 6210 mobile phones and some actually had laptops ranging from the hulking huge to the micro, but the ordinary ‘civilan’ at best would have a mobile and possibly a portable cd player or tape player.

Today, pretty much 90% of travellers (including holiday makers) take at least one laptop with them, ranging from the hip Apple to the much more regular netbooks. I also have to say it to the ‘netbooks are dead’ fraternity, the MAJORITY of computers I see particularly amongst the holiday maker is the Netbook – an Acer or an Asus. Everyone has a mobile, and certainly near 50% have a smartphone of some sort (although including any Nokia in this classification is almost heresy). Most smartphones are of the Blackberry variety (the business man) but with a rapidly growing number of Apple iPhone and Android devices.

Over the last six months though I have seen a change, in that I am regularly seeing the incidence of tablets and eReaders, with tablets occuring more regularly than the latter. As a rule the eReader of choice is definitely the Amazon Kindle, with a few Sony eReaders occurring. Today I have seen 3 Kindles amongst those waiting for my flight.

Now with the tablets however, I see the iPad primarily, but this week I have seen Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 inch devices and (a new one for me) the Blackberry Playbook. Today I saw 4 iPads, 1 Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 inch, and 1 Playbook amongst my fellow travellers. The occurence of music players is now almost nil, apart from Apple iPod Touches, with almost everyone you see going through their smartphones. Goodbye MP3 player, we knew you for such a short time.

I wonder what the future brings?

Apple Netbook

Rumours abound on the Internet over the weekend about Apple testing an Arm A5 based variant of the MacBook Air. That is an interesting proposition with the same limits as recent discussions about the Windows 8 variant for Arm – it leaves behind legacy completely. However this could just so easily be called the Apple Netbook, as one of the big reasons to use the Arm would be to seriously extend the battery life of the device and also to lower the price for the hardware, although as always Apple would still likely charge a premium – say £500/$600 for it.

On the very first episode of TiPb TV we joked about the 11 inch MacBook Air being more like an iPad pro, but deep inside Apple’s secret labs they might be working on making it exactly that according to Japanese blog Macotakara

via Apple secretly working on a MacBook Air with an iPad A5 chipset? | TiPb.

What do you think? Would you even buy it?

Netbook Death by iPad

A thought just struck me after reading yet another ‘Netbooks are dead’ article. Netbooks are not dead, they just need to evolve. As a keyboard based device, many people do want (but already have one). Many of them are looking to upgrade, however Netbooks have functionally changed little since 2007. There are some improvements such as Dual-Core Processors and improved Graphics subsystems, but these are not enough. What would really give them a shot in the arm is giving us what everyone finds so restrictive on the current set – the 1024×600 screen. Make that a 1024×768 or even a 1280 x 800 and then these machines would have a welcome boost as people upgrade. I would after all. What should not change however is their form factor – a 10.1 inch screen is great thing for travel. I am tempted to go for a 11.6/12.1 inch machine next but if there was a decent 10.1 incher then that would be my target.

Notebook Performance

I had cause recently to have an online conversation with a reader who believed that the only worthwhile computer equipment was the very fastest thing you can get. This person was looking at the needs equation from their own perspective which was as a gamer. This is so small a percentage of computer users, particularly mobile computer users, that all I can say is that they were completely and utterly wrong for the vast majority.

The vast majority use a computer to process documents (either read or create or both), browse the internet, read email, access social networking sites (business and/or personal), play music and play video. This is self evident in so many ways, and points to the fact that today a computer, particularly a mobile one, only has to be fast enough. In the old days the development of software outpaced the hardware periodically, requiring the hardware to be replaced just to get an acceptable basic performance. Today even a five year old laptop can run the latest word processor, web browser, email program, and music/video player. The issue is now so much more about battery life, weight, and ease of use.

So what is good enough today? Well as many have shown, most users are perfectly happy with netbook/notebook/notbooks that run with single/dual core 1.5/1.6GHz processors with 1-2GB of RAM. You can see these sorts of PCs still being heavily sold and also cropping up in most homes and schools. I will say though that the experience is not really swish with the lowest specification but they are good enough for almost everyone.

What do I use? Well I do have a number of netbooks with a minimum of 2GB RAM and 1.6GHz Atom processors and they run well enough although can be a little sluggish at times with some software combinations. For my main machine, I have a 1.2GHz Dual Core processor with 4GB of RAM and this is perfectly fine and gives excellent performance (along with the fact that I get excellent battery life at the same time). This is even good enough for some light encoding work (albeit slower than having a 2.2GHz Dual Core). This is what you should go for and nothing less. It is going to take more than a couple of years for people to come up with software that needs more than this. The most important things to have are RAM and Dual Core for that snappy response, as the enemy of all machines is having lots of disk access due to swapping and having a processor locked up doing something else.

Death of Netbooks…

ASUS1005HAThere have been many posts today (like this, and this) as follow up to the Acer story about them dropping netbooks as a product and effectively focusing on touch screen devices. The follow up has been largely about retractions from Acer that netbooks will be an important part of their product lineup.

Many people have stated that Netbooks are dead because of the iPad, but to be honest I do not believe that in the same way that I did not believe that netbooks would kill notebooks. One thing is clear, there is now a lot more choice in the device that you – the customer, personal or business, have when you are travelling. This is all about choice and fitting the perfect device for the individual’s way of working. Some people will find the iPad and similar incredibly suited to the way they work. Others will find the netbook perfect. In addition there are many people out there who believe the 17 inch Macbook Pro is the ideal machine for their own particular work flow.hp-tablet

There will be a reduction in the market for the netbook, just as the notebook had a reduced market when the netbook was introduced. What should be focused on is the size of the combined market of netbook, tablet and notebook… and my impression is that this total market is growing with the new devices. You only need look at people standing in the queue for security at the airport to see the big difference from just three short years ago. Back then you only saw business people with standard 15 inch laptops going through security, and now it is pretty much the majority of people are having to take the netbook/notebook out to have it scanned. Netbooks are everywhere… just as in 12 months from now tablets will be everywhere.

What I believe will happen though is that along with tablets getting more powerful, then the netbook will also become a little more powerful and keep its small size. In fact it is the ultra-portable business machine that is the endangered device in my book. Why give the business person £1500 of machine to break, lose and create a security problem with – give them a £300-£350 netbook with a remote access solution or the £400 tablet. Remember most business people only use Web, Mail and Office…

The Answer to Secure Mobile Computing?

Well Google spilled the beans on their Google ChromeOS NOTEBOOK (interesting that they do not call them netbooks, but then at 12.1inches it is certainly more light notebook than netbook. Here is the promo video.

It certainly has some very interesting features such as full encrypted file system, full separation between customer accounts, single sign on (through Google accounts, which for those using Google Apps is pretty good), and enterprise features – particularly with the number of corporate clients and Citrix being in the main demonstration. We will have to see what this will turn out like, but I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these little devices and put it through its paces as my general usage machine. Will it be powerful enough for me? Past experience with Linux on netbooks is against it, but maybe the cloud now offers the big features that killed my experience in the past dead – Good Calendaring and the handling of Project files.

Is the new MacBook Air eating into iPad sales?

Since the Late 2010 MacBook Air was released, there has been a huge amount of interest in the small and light space. Now the headlines are coming through asking the obvious bait question:-

Is the new MacBook Air eating into iPad sales?.

Until the recent release, most people were posting about whether the iPad was eating into Netbook sales. This sounds repetitive but I do not doubt the figures. There is variation in demand for these tools.

I prefer however to look at the wider situation – the one where I see netbooks used all over by many people and I also see many people using iPads, and also see many people using what could be called netbooks, but are actually ultralight notebooks. It all comes down to mobility and what people feel is useful for their particular situation, and I see the future for all of them.

I see this because I have netbooks, an iPad and an ultra-light notebook and use them according to need and suitability. I use my netbook when I want something small but I also want to generate content, and make use of particular software. I use my iPad for home browsing and quick consumption of content (particularly electronic magazines) within my home. I use my ultra-light for actual day to day work. I have a use for all of them…

They all have two things in common – good size for portable use and lots of battery life.

Key Performance Factors for the Mobile Worker

I was an instant convert to the netbook concept – the low cost, ultra light and small laptop with good battery life and excellent connectivity, at least when combined with 3G cards. I still am, and I keep my Asus 1008HA charged up and available whenever I am travelling and suspect I need a PC but not needing to carry anything larger. In fact, I used it for a very long time as my primary machine – and very capable it was once I upgraded it to 2GB memory. Over all this time, if I had to pick out its most important performance feature I would have to pick out its battery life.

I come from the depths of time when battery life was measured in less than 3 hours, but the Asus provided me with between 4 and 6 hours of good PC time depending upon whether I was Internet connected or not. This gave me the taster however, and I have just moved across to a slightly larger but still very compact and light machine, the Asus UL30. The key factor in this move? its battery life, the headline value of 12 hours of use.

In reality, it has given me 8 to 10 hours depending upon Internet usage but this has meant I have the ‘all (business) day battery life’. I have proved it in the last couple of weeks with an all day trip by train to Cologne and back, and several days of all day meetings where the power sockets were in very short supply. I survived without a single sweat.

This makes battery life the most important or key performance factor for me, and I suspect that this is the case for many other mobile workers. Which is why the industry is pushing more and more products out with longer and longer lasting batteries, notable of which is the latest netbook products from Asus:

ASUS makes EeePC 1015P and 1015PE official, endows them with 13.5 hours of battery life — Engadget.

Of course, this has to be hand in hand with good keyboards, screens and processor capability and I believe firmly that all netbooks with 2GB are plenty fast enough for office and information worker tasks, although going with multi-core and even the higher performance CULV processors gives a welcome boost without impacting the battery life.

What do you think? Is battery life primary? or is it performance? or light weight? and are netbooks the ultimate for all three?

iPad, NetPad, Smartbook, Netbook, Laptop, whatever

I could not let the event pass, the launch of the Apple iPad. This raises the interesting questions of what is this iPad? what does it mean? what use is it? At least from the mobile worker perspective.

To me it is simple, it just another device in the realm that has not got one name, inhabited by the continuum of webpad, smartbook, netbook and laptops. However where does it fit in? To cut the discussion short it is, as a device running a restricted unitasking OS, most definitely fitting into the cutdown low end area of webpads. This is despite the high price.

So does the mobile worker use a webpad? Not at all, unless it is there as part of a vertical market application need. As this therefore there is no interest here, and we can all move along. For the home, there can be a different argument I am sure.

But I hear you say, what about smartbooks and netbooks? What use are these to the mobile worker? They can be just as simple and not suitable for business mobile use? Well that may have been true once with the early EeePC 701, and is true of smartbooks in my opinion, but the modern netbook has evolved. It has evolved into ultra compact laptops as they had of old but without the high end price. More on that in a future post.