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The Quest For The Best Consumer Tech…2012 Edition: Computers, Clouds, and a Cornucopia of Communication Choices
This time last year I had ditched my iPad in favor of my first Android tablet, the original Asus Transformer, I was in the midst of a struggle to find the perfect smartphone, and I was taking my first plunges into thin client computing (using JoliOS as a daily driver for my laptop) while I anxiously awaited the arrival of my ever so exciting Samsung Chromebook.
A lot has changed in 12 months. My love of Linux, slavish devotion to Android and dismissals of Windows, OSX, and iOS as pretty but irrelevant toys for the masses have made way for a more pragmatic mix of products and services. I have learned that there is no one tool to rule them all, although I believe we’re getting quite close.
Since I’m not a professional IT worker, nor a tech writer, my perspectives are all from the average use corner. In other words, devoid of fanboy loyalty and the specific software requirements that make one platform compulsory over another for heavy use tech professionals, what was the absolute best arrangement of tech from a user friendliness and convenience point of view for me, this year?
The Chromebook One Month Later: Tantalizingly Close, But Still Feels Beta
{EAV:4c41a062839ce378}
Wait. Why Do I Have A Desktop?
This is the desktop on my Samsung Chromebook.
Two things should jump out at you.
1. It’s awesomely reminiscent of Mac OS (but slightly sexier)
and
2. Why the heck do I have a desktop on my Chromebook?
The answer to 2 is that I shouldn’t, but I have to.
As everyone who’s been reading lately knows, I am an unabashed fan of the idea of ChromeOS and Chromebooks in general. A super light, super quick OS that is essentially just a web browser with a file manager built-in? In a world where most users either do, or could if properly informed, spend all of their time in a web browser, ChromeOS is a computing philosophy that feels perfect. It’s certainly the shape of things to come.
In practice the idea mostly holds up. I’ve used my Samsung Series 5 as my primary machine for the past month and, with very few exceptions, it’s functioned exactly as I’d expected it to. Samsung’s claims of an eight-hour battery life have more than held up; I do most of my work from coffee shops and client’s offices and I haven’t had to pack my charging cable once. In fact, most days I get home and still get an hour or two of use out of the machine before I finally see the low battery warning.
Likewise, the Chromebook’s footprint is nigh perfect. I hate the cramped feel of a netbook, but I also hate the weight and bulk of most laptops. The Series 5 straddles the gap between the two quite nicely. It’s almost as compact as a netbook, but the slightly larger screen and full size keyboard make it feel far less like a toy than comparable offerings from ASUS, Acer and Dell.
Web browsing is terrific; the wi-fi radio seems to have a better range than that in any of the notebooks I’ve used in the last year, which means that, compared to my wife’s Macbook on our home wi-fi network, I get far less signal and drop issues. Occasionally I’ve run into the too-many-tabs= uber-lag issues that others have reported, but with every OS update those occurrences happen less and less frequently.
But the Chromebook does have a few failings. And, unfortunately, the areas it fails at are fairly crippling. Read the rest of this entry
SOPA V. Soapy: In 2012 Government and Big Business Will Understand How Powerless They Are In The Face Of Human Ingenuity
SOPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act.
If you have a web browser open for most of the day, or you just happened to have badly misspelled soap in a Google search, you’ve come across SOPA.
The entertainment industry and, I suspect, some folks along the Republican side of the aisle, want the ability to block any website from view that could have possibly, maybe once, but we’re not really sure, hosted copyrighted content illegally. In principle, I get it. The entertainment companies would very much like to stop dumping millions of dollars into projects that have to actually be good in order to recoup their cost. The current state of affairs seems to be; “I create a crappy but mildly entertaining product, people get wind of the fact that it’s probably not going to be very good and therefore not worthy of their hard-earned money and they either download it illegally, or wait for it to arrive on DVD, OnDemand, or Netflix.
The simple solution, of course would be for content producers to stop churning out endless acres of crap. But that’s never going to happen. So we get SOPA; a nuclear option to stop the money from bleeding out.
But is the money bleeding out in enough quantities to warrant a nuclear option?
I really don’t think so.
Read the rest of this entry
Mobile Is Dooming Itself: Cool Things Shouldn’t Destroy The Continued Development Of Useful Things
I know, I know, I said I didn’t care about what CES had to offer this year. I figured that if I spent the next few days just reading web comics and Mac news, I’d be able to avoid any news coming out of that once hyper-exciting event.
Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Leander Kahney, the editor over at Cult of Mac, wrote up this little ditty about the current state of Consumer Electronics and where all the sales are coming from. In short, smartphones and tablets are eating up all of our spending dollars, to the exclusion of pretty much every other device type, other than high-end cameras (which are kind of niche comparatively, anyway).
I say this as someone who is passionately committed to seeing the mobile space and cloud computing grow; this is very bad news for all of us.
I spend the majority of my days away from my office. I work out of coffee shops, client’s offices and, occasionally, Mexican villas. I love and depend on mobile technology to make my work life possible. But I also, even though I hardly ever use them in person, depend on things like my desktop, standard sized laptops, Blu-Ray player etc. Without those tools, my mobile life would significantly less convenient. Read the rest of this entry
Gadget Fatigue: After All The Crazy, I’ve Simplified My Mobile Footprint
Right around the time I started playing with my Chromebook, I got really, really tired of reading the Tech feed on my Feedly app. I don’t care what new and exciting pile of new Android phones are going to be released at CES this year; I’m already bored by the array of Ultrabooks that have hit the market, each one aiming for and utterly missing both the point and beauty of the MacBook Air, and, so help me, if I hear one more iPhone 5 or iPad 3 rumor, I will set the internet on fire. Which might prevent the passing of SOPA so we’ll keep that idea on the back burner.
My wife will be happy to hear that I’m more interested in her than in Tech-Crunch again.
To say that I’ve been tech obsessed for the last 2 years would be a lie. I’ve been a tech stalker. If you could legally charge someone with creepiness towards gadgets, I would be the first case on the docket.
My name is Julian, and I’m a technology fetishist. Read the rest of this entry
