There's nothing like a little travelling to make you appreciate your laptop. Keeping in touch with those back home as well as generally keeping in touch with the world.
Once upon a time I had a large office with a big desk covered in kit and hiding a load more kit below.
Then I chucked out the large tower PC with all its special plug-ins for a cube PC with everything I required on board.
This made me realise I could live without PCI slots and that storage could be external and I bought my first laptop.
The laptop was very specific. It was to be a desktop replacement, fully funtional and powerful. Able to run video editing s/w, store my vast AAC libray and play DVDs in big-screen format. I opted for the HP Pavilion 17" widescreen, with Harmen-Kardon sound and a hyperthreading processor.
Everything worked a treat. I migrated my life onto the Pavilion just in time for my 6 month stint in Lake Tahoe where it did its job, successfully functioning as a games machine (online Texas Hold-em), web browser (oh that glorious 3Mbit cable connection), photo store, VoIP phone, DVD player and music jukebox. It was only ever moved to watch DVDs from the couch - great on the widescreen and the Harmon Kardon speaker system is amazing, I've never heard anything like it on a laptop.
However, once the summer arrived with the Cali roadtrips and daily jaunts to the Blue Angel for web access, I started to wish it was a bit lighter and smaller. Battery life took a turn for the worse and balancing the hot machine on a leg to prevent blocking the cooling vents is a pain (literally).
So it's now time to continue the experiment and see if I can downsize once more.
With my free Nokia 6630 doing a fine job of picking up email from anywhere, as well as IM chat on the move and the occasional web-surf, I decided a PDA was not necessary. The main benefits would be WiFi on a larger screen, and mobile video. Good but no cigar.
Blew hot and cold on UMPCs for a few days. Concluded they were too big to be pocketsize and too small for serious work.
Finally I looked carefully at tablet PCs. I really like the idea of freeing up the restrictions of browsing to the extent of losing the keyboard and mouse for a pen and voice recognition. Although I really like the slate format of tablet PC (ie no fold-out keyboard) I would seriously miss the omission of an optical drive. These only seem to come with the comvertible tablets. So, for now I will buy a cheap, small slate tablet (the HP TC1000 or TC1100) and keep my HP Pavilion while I trial the whole concept.
In time I will hopefully be in a position to sell both and replace with a larger more fully spec'd convertible tablet, good enough for all eventualities.
6 comments:
Nice, I still don't think that you need a DVD drive with you all the time .
Get the smallest tablet you can with a decent screen then have a desktop/large laptop for doing all your video stuff.
Most of the time you won't need a DVD drive as you will have access to a network or enough space on the HDD for a few Divx's. If you really do then get a nice USB slimline one that you carry in the bag along with the USB/bluetooth keyboard.
john
Think you're right. If I can find a slim enough dvd drive then no problem.
Also I'm leaning toward the idea of a Mac Mini for the desk/video work...
DVD DVD DVD, I chant.
Okay, we don't neeeeed a DVD drive, but it would be nice, no? The iddy biddy Vaio has an iddy biddy light DVD drive, what's up with the tablets?
I'm guessing it's cos they are aiming these things at schools and business peeps on the move. Not so much as Home PCs for entertainment.
Shame though - it wouldn't take much to slip in a diddy DVD drive - doesn't even have to be a recorder.
If you're patient enough (who am I kidding?) you could just go for an iTablet
It has Wi-Fi and so needs very little online storage. "The network is the computer" or some such marketing jumbo. Anyway if you were going to get a DVD drive then you would really need to go for a HD-DVD or BlueRay or both? DVDs are so last century, put them away with your Mini-disks, CDs, DAT tapes, and LPs, then wait till they are as cool as 8-track before you get them out again.
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