Alec Saunders SquawkBox

A decade ago I had one of the first Sony Vaio executive notebooks.  It was a gloriously light, metallic purple titanium-clad affair which turned heads everywhere I went.  At just 12 or 13 in size, it was the perfect travelling companion, and with my Microsoft budget, affordable for an aspiring young mid-manager.  I used it everywhere — meetings, planes, coffee shops — you name it, it was always with me.

In recent years, however, notebooks have ballooned in size.  My Toshiba Tecra A-1 had a 15″ screen.  My more recent HP DV6000 was even larger.  Weight has increased to the point where I walk with a permanent lean, and the possibility of working on a plane has all but disappeared as airlines have crammed seats together.

For the last couple of days I’ve been travelling with the HP Mini 1000 — Mini-Me.  This diminutive “netbook” weighs just over 2 pounds, has a 10.1″ screen, and runs Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2007 just fine.  I’ve used it in airports, on airplanes, in board rooms and hotel rooms.  Size-wise, it’s perfect for travelling.  The battery lasts long enough at 2.5 hours, although I will probably upgrade to the 6 cell battery coming in the new year which claims to extend usage to over 4 hours.

Caveats?  Sure, there are a few.  If you buy a Mini, consider the following:

• To be really productive in a hotel, you’re going to want to get a travel mouse as well.  My choice was a slim little number I picked up at Fry’s, but any mouse will do.  Skip the wireless mouse — the dongle is just one more part to carry and lose.
• The Mini has no VGA out.  That’s right… none.  It does, however, have a proprietary peripheral port, and HP has promised to ship a VGA adapter cable for that port in the new year.  In the meantime, if you need to do presentations from the mini, you’re going to need an USB VGA adapter.  I’m using one from GXT.  It works fine.
• You’re going to need a bag.  The appeal of this device is that it’s small, but that also means that the external peripherals — including the small brick-like power charger — are going to be extras you carry everywhere with you.
• You’ll need to get used to scrolling your screen.  Most web sites now assume 1024×768 as a standard screen dimension.  The Mini’s screen, while very readable, is a non-standard 1024×600.

Despite the small drawbacks, I’m very happy. For the first time in a long time, I’ve not felt the stress of the massive pile of work accumulating “at home” while I’m on the road.

When CBC’s Jesse Brown asked Is Canada becoming a digital ghetto, my answer was an immediate “Of course”.  Canadians who don’t travel or do business outside of the country would never know this, but the wars being fought and won over consumer digital rights in other parts of the world are simply not news here. Canadians will pay more for phones and televisions because the CRTC has sided with carriers on the crucial issue of network neutrality.  Because of our “Made in Canada” copyright reform, ordinary Canadians who buy and share music with family members will become criminals in their own homes.

My American friends speak glowingly of the convenience of being able to download and watch television using services like Hulu.com.  They enjoy generous flat rate plans for telecom that give them virtually unlimited buckets of minutes and are driving a booming mobile telecom industry.

They have these innovative products and services because the regulator in the US favours the consumer and not the entrenched network interests.

Yesterday morning I twittered that I was abandoning all my previous IM systems and standardizing on Skype.  It generated some interesting responses in the blogosphere, which I didn’t really expect.  To me, it was a bit of a non-event. I just wanted people to know how to reach me.

In any case, I’ve now shut down both GTalk and MSN Messenger on all my PCs, leaving them with a status message which simply says “Contact me on Skype”. This after shutting down my Yahoo! Messenger and AIM accounts over a year ago.

Why?

There are perhaps three or four people I know who use these other tools to message with me anymore.  The vast majority of people in my orbit (you may be different) have migrated to Skype.  So why:

1. go through the startup pain associated with starting a bunch of IM clients that I don’t use.
2. sacrifice the memory and processor cycles on my pc to run a bunch of IM clients that I don’t use.
3. gum up my system tray and start menu with a bunch of icons for IM clients that I don’t use.

You see my point, I’m sure.  The other IM clients are perfectly useful.  There’s nothing wrong with them.  I just don’t have any need for them, anymore.  My network doesn’t include folks who can’t reach me any other way as they all seem to have migrated to Skype.

Telecom operators are often held up as backward dinosaurs, especially compared to the keepers of the “open” flame in the internet community.  Those telecom operators quite happily pass telephone calls and text messages from one network to another, though.

By comparison, two and a half years ago, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that their networks would interoperate.  At the time many of us called for them to deliver an open specification, delivering us from the IM Gulag that the industry has created.  Today there is still no respite in sight.

Ironic isn’t it?  And would Skype have been able to achieve this dominance if MSN, Yahoo, AOL et al had chosen to open their networks, treating their IM clients as virtual handsets rather than as advertising platforms?

We’ll never know.

Over the past weekend I picked up one of the new HP Mini 1000 netbooks.  As much as I love my HP DV6000 entertainment laptop with its massive 17″ screen, it is heavy (12 cell battery), near impossible to work with on an airplane without paying for a business class seat or being lucky enough to sit in the exit row, and boots slowly because of all of the software I’ve got loaded onto it.  I needed something simple, small and very portable to complement the beefier computing environment I surround myself with on a day to day basis.  The Mini fills the bill.  With a tiny 10″ screen, no optical drive, a microscopic 60G hard drive, and a tiny 3 cell battery, the Mini weighs just over 2 lbs and is the size of an oversize paperback book.

Despite the small battery, one can comfortably get 2.5 hours of use from a single charge.  HP’s decision to go with the Atom processor rather than the VIA C-7M they used in their previous netbook (the 2133) makes a difference in both power consumption on and performance.

The big advantage of the Mini over other netbooks I looked at from Toshiba and Acer was keyboard size.  With a near full-size keyboard (HP claims 92%) the Mini is a serviceable replacement for a laptop when used for email and some lightweight computing.  It’s enough for the light email I do in front of the television at night, or email and powerpoint presentations on the road.  However, with it’s 1G of RAM, small screen and relatively modest single core processor, you won’t be editing video or photos using this device.  And with 60G of storage space only, that doesn’t leave much room for music.  Better to carry an iPod for that.

The Mini comes with very little software — Windows XP and Microsoft Works — and is blessedly free of the mountains of “free offers” and other shovel-ware that PC manufacturers cram onto their products today.  I removed Works, and added Office 2007 Standard Edition, Skype, Tweetdeck, and Google Chrome.  I also added Microsoft’s Live Mesh (which I find more and more useful every day), and because I have a large number of files I manage under Foldershare which I haven’t migrated to Mesh, Foldershare as well.

Performance, with this minimal set of tools, is excellent.

If you’re lucky enough to live in the US,  the Mini comes with a SIM slot tucked away behind the battery.  Insert a SIM with a broadband data plan, and presto, the Mini becomes an always-on, always-connected device.  Forget about Cafe’s — open the Mini up anywhere that 3G coverage exists, and you’ll be online and working instantly.  I’m hoping we see a similar initiative by Rogers in Canada. The SIM slot is in the device sold in Canada, but the drivers and dial-up software aren’t available.

The Mini is priced at $499 US.  Here in Canada Future Shop sells them for $550.  At that price point, it’s clear that this device is intended as a super mobile companion for another compute environment.  So far, I’m quite impressed.

I spent yesterday at the annual Winter Arts and Pottery Sale put on by the Nepean Visual Arts Centre with Janice.  It was a trade show, but not the usual kind of show I attend.  No switches, routers, or PBX’s in sight, and nary a phone anywhere!  Instead, row upon row of local artists and potters selling their work.  Janice was showing a series of quilted batik wall hangings that she’s been working on recently.

Although there is a lot of quality work at this event, the show has been poorly attended.  It seems to have been  under-promoted, with fewer than 300 people visiting the artists.  That’s a shame, since many of the artists have huge amounts of work on display, and have obviously spent months working to prepare.

The show is still on today, and admission is free.  So if you’re in Ottawa, drop by and check out the show at the Nepean Sportsplex.  There are lots of nice pieces to see and if you’re in the mood to buy,  bargains to be had with some very nice work up for sale.

Back to our regularly scheduled telecom stuff tomorrow…