I decided to jump into the netbook arena when I saw a nice brown (yes, I also have a brown Zune) Acer One for under $300 (got mine for $270 before they became more popular). With 1gb RAM and a 16gb SSD for a hard drive I figured I'd see what it could do. It came with XP home and an Office 2007 trial pre-loaded. My first impression was that I was actually kind of impressed with the performance. Web-browsing, document manipulation, and general futzing around seemed on par with your average 2+ year old PC.
I started getting a little bored. I was reading about the virtues of Ubuntu, a Linux-based OS. Long story short, I loaded fresh install of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and found it to be...meh? Sure, the UI was a little snappier in a few areas. I really liked the Desktop and how that worked. Finding Windows-equivalent applications was relatively easy once I figured out software installation works in Ubuntu (pretty nifty, by the way). I had a few challenges finding the right drivers for some stuff, but all-in-all it was pretty straight-forward.
Time to take it on the road. After all, that's why I got the thing right? Well, it travels well and made my standard laptop seem like a "luggable" from back in the day. Battery life isn't stellar with my 3-cell battery, but I did make it all the way through "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" on the plane--unfortunately. The 6-cell obviously has a longer life but makes it all heavier and sticks out funny. Wi-fi picked up hotspots with ease.
The rub. I'm a gadget-man and not ashamed to admit it. I love it when gadgets work and hate it when they don't. On my first trip traveling with the Ubuntu netbook, I found out that I couldn't get several of my favorite gadgets to work with Ubuntu. My dive computer, GPS watch, and Zune (yes, the brown one) did not have compatible drivers and/or software. Maybe it's possible under various flavors of emulators, but I tried really, really hard with no luck. The other major issue I had with Ubuntu was with OpenOffice. While I admire the efforts of that community, OpenOffice acts and feels like imitation crab. It's a workable substitute, but you won't enjoy it.
After the road trip, it was back to XP. I installed a netbook-friendly "flavor" of XP, reloaded all my favorite Windows-friendly apps and...well...now the thing ran like crap. DON'T USE NTFS ON AN SSD DRIVE!
Thanks to the good folks at PartitionMagic, I was able to drop down to Fat32 and things were back to smooth sailing. Replacing the 512mb RAM module with a 1gb module was a bit of a chore but probably worth the $20.
Now let's crank things up...
What would happen if I wanted to use this bugger as an emergency web-dev tool? I loaded all of my basic "go-to" development apps including: .NET Frameworks 2.0 & 3.5, Web Developer Express 2008, SQL Server Express 2008 + Management Studio, IIS 7.0, Silverlight 2 & 3, and some other lightweight apps).
The verdict? It works! Realistically, I'm not going to use this for day-to-day work, but as an on-the-road-in-a-pinch, I would feel confident in being able to pound out some inspired code on the fly or jump in to work on an emergency situation.
In a recent focus group meeting I was helping to facilitate I was once again reminded of the importance of realizing when you're trying to force something that is getting in the way of the primary objective. Our negotiated contract with the client was to use the focus group to help construct a logic model that the agency could begin to use to focus themselves.
What rapidly became apparent was that there was little understanding or appetite in the group for building a logic model and the meeting had to shift to a new process--fast. The beauty was that the client loved it and the participants never noticed. Though they were initially sold on the the "logic model", the resulting process was organic and brought the group to a place beyond what people were expecting. We can build the logic model in the background based on the information we got, but we couldn't have gotten the level of information we needed had we tried to pound through the logic model as a group.
I'm as guilty as anyone for finding new technologies that have so much potential yet may not be the right thing at the right time. Forcing implementation under these circumstances is painful and frustrating for everyone. I find that, if I stay open from the start to the possibility that, no matter how cool the technology, if things start feeling "forced" I know it's time to back off. Just bust out the sticky notes, markers, white pads and start kickin' it old school until things are back on track.
I recently got my invitation to try out Google's new Voice service. Once again, the price is free and you can get your own invitation here. Setting up yet another dependency on a free beta product from Google concerns me but not enough to keep me from trying it out.
Getting setup is pretty simple. You can pick a phone number for yourself ($10 fee to change it later, so don't screw up!). I did a search for the last four digits of my current mobile number and got a number that was very similar--don't know why this was important to me, but it was. Once I picked my number, I was able to add the phones I wanted to associate with that number. I have only one phone for everything, so that part wasn't terrible exciting.
The Highs
- Easy to setup
- Seems like plenty of numbers to chose from
- Numbers will be portable (an initial concern of mine)
- Price is right. I might even pay a bit for some premium feature down the line.
- Love the SMS feature. Allows text messaging online even if you can't access your phone!
- Familiar GMail-style layout
- Able to create custom greetings just for the Google voice number (top feature for me)
- Nice privacy features
- Voicemail to email and call notifications
The Lows
- Limited to one number per GMail account (maybe a nice premium feature for the future)
- Didn't see any 800 number options (another nice premium feature for the future)
- No direct tie-in to GMail
- Had mixed results with the voice transcriber
- No real app for Windows Mobile yet
- Further pwnership by Google
Why this service works for me?
I have a consulting side to me that I like to keep somewhat separated from my personal side. As previously mentioned, I use one phone for everything and don't want that to change. Google voice gives me a separate number that I can use to identify and triage calls coming to my phone. My voicemail greetings make sense depending on the number people use to contact me, and I can answer the phone in a manner that also makes sense for the context of the caller.
I'm sure there will be many creative uses for this service and I am interested in hearing any you might come up with.