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?

Home Use

At the end of 2011 I had just started a home based business revolving around social media consulting. My home office was my only office. For day to day use, most of my life revolved around a 2010 model 27” iMac. There were a few reasons I had ventured into the house that Steve built, but I’ll start with the most embarrassing one; my wife had a Macbook Pro and I was jealous. (This was, incidentally, the same driving force that finally caused me to ditch smartphone photography and buy a DSLR this year; I couldn’t stand the idea of using inferior tech around someone with better toys.)

Apple’s build quality and simplistic yet elegant approach to software design was wildly appealing and, if I’m being honest, I fell a little for the prestige associated with owning a Mac. That’s not to say that the iMac wasn’t a brilliant machine. It was beautifully designed, I never struggled to find adequate software equivalents to programs that I had used previously on Windows and it never, ever crashed. In fact, in the year+ that I used it, I can only remember rebooting the system about a half dozen times. For anyone used to exclusively using Windows that last fact alone makes Mac ownership fairly appealing. The problem is, system stability advantages don’t come nativley to Apple products due to design wizardy but rather from a lack of trust on Apple’s part of their customers. It’s much, much harder to break an OSX device because there’s much less access for the average user to command level tweaks and customizations than on a Windows machine. If you’re a fairly vanilla user with your tech, Apple may be the way to go, simply because of the titanium skinned impenetrable UI condom they wrap their software in.

But I’m not that user.

Over the year I found that I depended on a home desktop less and less and on mobile tech more and more and so, by the middle of this fall, the iMac had become a very expensive media server; sitting idle in the basement, pumping out content to our phones, tablets and laptops. Without a whole lot of complaint from anyone in the family I sold it and we went desktopless for a couple of months.

Unfortunately, it turns out that my home, at least, still needs a desktop computer. My daughter is in Grade 1 and needs a reliable machine to do school work on (she doesn’t go to one of the fancier public schools that has adopted either Chromebooks or iPads for student use) and between my wife and I, we do a lot of photo editing and a shared laptop just wasn’t cutting it so, after a bit of research and a few arguments we settled on a touch enabled all-in-one PC running Windows 8, setup on a dual monitor system. So far it’s doing it’s job; the kids love the novelty of of touch on a desktop and with the Windows 8 Modern UI Microsoft has finally found the sweet spot for a touch enabled home computer. I’ll get more into the merits of Windows 8 in the mobile and OS segments below, but it is my pick so far for the best computing platform available.

Mobile Computing: Laptop/Tablet

Up until fall of 2011 I had been an iPad loyalist. For the better part of a year, unless I needed to hook up to a projector or fill out a PDF form (something that I can now do on an iPad thanks to the continued advancement of app functionality by committed developers) the iPad was my go to device for everyday mobile computing. Its build quality was unchallenged as was its app ecosphere. Android was the winner, in my opinion, when it came to handsets, but there was no competition when it came to tablets.

Two devices landed in my lap in late 2011 that had me gleefully relegate the iPad to the dustbin. In November I got my hands on a first generation Asus Transformer with keyboard dock. Android 4.0 was brand spanking new and made Android on a tablet feel whole for the first time, and Asus had put a tremendous amount of work into making the Transformer feel like an adequate laptop replacement in ways that the iPad simply didn’t at that time. It had expandable storage (I had mine at 128 GB altogether between local storage, the SD slot, and micro SD slot), the keyboard was a joy to use and the combined battery power of the tablet and dock meant that I didn’t have to recharge for sometimes up to five days at a time with light to moderate use. The build quality was lacking; all plastic and rough corners like every other Android tablet up ‘til that point (though this was corrected with the Transformer Prime and all subsequent models which rivaled Apple on build quality) but I was willing to compromise on that in exchange for the perceived gains in productivity and the real gains in flexibility of the OS. The thing was, after the novelty wore off, I didn’t find myself reaching for it nearly as often as I had my iPad. It wasn’t just the fact that my old Dell laptop had retaken a spot in my heart once I refreshed it with first an Ubuntu install and then JoliOS, it was that the tablet experience, even on a premium Android tablet, just wasn’t as immersive as it had been on the iPad. Customization was better, productivity (in theory) was better, I loved the multi-tasking, workflow, and social sharing elements that Android just murdered iOS with, and yet….

Something wasn’t right.

And then distraction landed in the form of the Chromebook. Much maligned at it’s original price point and in its early adoption days, I loved the Samsung Chromebook. I had been training myself for it by using JoliOS on my laptop for several months and felt that I was ready to move to a thin client, web-only OS that revolved around nothing but the Google apps that had become my daily productivity tools anyway. I won’t give a breakdown here but if you’re curious about Google’s foray into a cloud OS, I detailed my original experiences here. Suffice it to say, the Chromebook became my only mobile computing device for months. I didn’t need an abundance of local storage and I was already spending ninety percent of the time I used a computer in the browser; I was the Chromebook’s ideal user.

For a while.

In Spring of 2012, I accepted a COO position that required a bit more of a robust computing environment. The job has a fairly high travel component and the need for standardized software deployment across a team of employees so, rather than ask them all to join me in the clouds (impractical for a lot of reasons, but mainly because I live in Canada where Chrome OS devices aren’t retailed yet) I molded to the job and went hunting for a super portable Windows 7 device. After a lot of hand wringing and exchanges I settled on the Asus Zenbook; a MacBook Air clone running Windows 7 and coming in at about 60% of the cost of an equivalently specced MBA.
I loved it and used it regularly until about a month ago. Because the Zenbook was so slim I found I didn’t really use the Asus Transformer (a Prime by this point) as a productivity device anymore, and really only picked it up as a tablet when I wanted to read. Since the 10 inch tablet form is particularly nasty as an ebook reader if that’s all you’re using it for, I started hunting around for a good 7 inch tablet. By this point I’d grown a bit bored of Android on a tablet and decided to take advantage of the fact that the Blackberry Playbook’s dismal retail failure had caused unit prices to plummet.

That’s right, I bought a Playbook.

I don’t know what these were like before Playbook OS 2.0; I can’t imagine anyone using one without native email and calendar support, which is how they came out of the box unless you owned a Blackberry handset as well. Even with OS 2.0 however, the Playbook experience felt broken. Yes, you could use the Android app player to run sideloaded Android applications so you weren’t limited to the Blackberry World’s dismal offerings. But most consumers lacked the tech savvy to do so and finding reliable repositories of those apps would probably cost more effort than the average tablet user is willing to go to.

Here’s the thing; while the app ecosphere for Playbook is dreadful and remains so to this day, Playbook OS is brilliant. It’s lightyears ahead of iOS on multitasking and ease of navigation, makes excellent use of its hardware and is possibly the slickest tablet UI I’ve come across. Using it was delightful. Sadly, there wasn’t much one could use it for. It was a very pretty but empty child.
Luckily, Google and Asus released the Nexus 7 this past summer, which had the very best mix of OS (vanilla Android 4.1 aka Jelly Bean), application ecosphere, and hardware I’d seen in the 7” form factor. I snapped one up as soon as they became available and up until just recently it was my go to device for anything that didn’t require a keyboard. It was also the tablet that caused my wife to get over her iOS addiction and prompted her next smartphone purchase to be the Samsung Galaxy SIII, rather than an iPhone 5.

So what am I using now?

Well, that’s a bit complicated.

See, I got into photography in a big way this year and started carrying around a camera bag everywhere a couple of months ago. That meant that I had to go back to a ten inch tablet form for my day to day productivity, as even the Zenbook’s thin body won’t fit properly in the front pouch of my camera bag. For work I elected to go with a simple Lenovo laptop, permanently stationed at the office with Logmein turned on for remote access to my day to day desktop software. But I needed a tablet for work tasks on the road as well as news consumption, reading books etc. and my Nexus 7 simply wasn’t of a size to handle the challenge. I considered going back to the Asus Transformer Prime and was actually en route to buy one, when I wandered by an Apple Store and saw my old friend, the iPad. I wound up picking up an iPad 2, rather than the sexier and more expensive iPad with Retina Display or iPad 4 or whatever they’re calling it these days. I don’t need a Retina display and, as I was happy to discover, combined with a Logitech Ultrathin keyboard cover and some marked improvements in productivity apps (including the Drive app from Google, which I’m typing this article on) the iPad 2 is more than up to the task of operating as my everyday mobile computing device.

Now (deep breath)…

I don’t like iOS anywhere near as much as Android 4.1. I despise Apple’s “multitasking” and I desperately miss the app integration of Android (sharing data from any app to any app without having to cut and paste) however….

The tablet app ecosphere is simply better for iOS. There are more ways (and more high quality ways) to perform productivity or creative tasks on the iPad than in Android. And, while I hadn’t really noticed it for the last year using Android tablets almost exclusively, iPad apps just look better and are more immersive than their Android brethren. I’ll use my favorite news app, Zite, as an example. On Android, Zite is perfectly serviceable; all of my stories are gathered by category, I can indicate whether I enjoyed a story or not and the app learns what kind of content to provide for me. But Zite, no matter what Android device I use it on, is a bit buggy. It’s prone to crashing, if I accidentally flick my finger across a page without turning it, all of the active headlines freeze and I can’t access any of the stories on that page without turning back one page and then moving forward again. Not so on the iPad. Not only is the same learning function present, but I can refine the app’s way of learning by specifying what writers I want to see more content from or what sub-categories of content I want to see. Not only is Zite completely bug free on the iPad but it’s graphically far more pleasing. Transitions are lightning fast and animated, the in-app browser for non-locally stored stories is amazingly fast compared to its Android version, and overall I spend far more time using it now then I did even on my Nexus 7.

This isn’t a compliment to Apple however, but rather an insult to developers for overlooking Android. Android is the biggest mobile platform on planet Earth. It has hit or is about to hit 75% of smartphone marketshare. There is no reason, other than fragmentation, why an iOS version of a tablet app should look and perform that much better than its Android equivalent. Figure this out guys.

Going back to the iPad made me cranky though. There’s a device on the horizon that will allow me to do everything the iPad does and everything my laptop does. That device is the Microsoft Surface Pro.

I get why Microsoft released the Surface RT first. It’s cheaper (much closer in concept and price to the iPad), so it makes a far more tantalizing Christmas present. I get it. But RT is broken. You can’t roll out a new OS, that so perfectly mimics its desktop counterpart, and not have the ability to install legacy software. Not when your Store is thus far extremely limited in app content. They should have released the Pro first; superior in hardware to the iPad, expandable, connectable, and with the ability to run Windows 8 Pro, the first truly excellent touch experience for Windows. The day that comes out my iPad and my laptop are being retired for one do-it-all device.

2013 can’t get here soon enough.

Mobile Computing: Phone

I’ll get this out of the way at the outset. When it comes to phones, I’m an Android guy all the way. I like the variety of hardware, I love rooting and customizing my phones with custom ROMS, I like the larger screen sizes. I am not an iPhone guy. I had two of them (the 3gs and the 4) and found it to be an experience devoid of any joy, much like the Android 10 inch tablet scenario.
The problem is, I’ve become a compulsive upgrader. This year I’ve owned a Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Milestone, HTC Evo 3D, LG Optimus 3D, Galaxy SII HD LTE, Galaxy SIII and finally a Galaxy Note.

I’ve had the Note the longest. Seven weeks. I’m going to keep it until the Nexus 4 comes out and then that’ll be my baby for a little while. Phones are my most expensive hobby, even with reselling on Kjiji, but I have the least to say about them. When it comes to a smartphone, as far as I’m concerned, there is no better platform than Android. Fragmentation yields endless variety in hardware flavors, Android 4.1 is smoother than iOS, and Google Now works better than Siri. Yes, Windows Phone 8 is tempting, especially with its syncing capability with Windows 8 and yes, iPhone has a much better battery than pretty much anything other than the Droid Razr Maxx, but dollar for dollar if you’ve got a Nexus, Galaxy S or Galaxy Note device, you have the best in class. The way Android on a phone handles multitasking, social sharing, app integration etc. is just light years ahead of anything else.

iPhones are phones that have some computer functionality built in. Android phones are computers with a cellular radio built in. There’s no competition as to which is the better device class.

OS

This year I’ve used, as daily drivers, Windows 7, OSX Lion, OSX Mountain Lion, Ubuntu, JoliOS, Android, iOS, Chrome OS and Windows 8.

For me, with the caveat that you need a touch screen at least and a two monitor setup ideally to fully appreciate it, Windows 8 is the OS story of this year. But before I tackle that I’ll give a quick summation of where I am with everything else.

Windows 7:

Best, all around, you know how to use it, it probably came on your computer and you never thought about it again OS that Microsoft has ever released. It works better and looks prettier than any other previous version of Windows. If you’re running this and it does everything you need, there’s no reason to leave it.

OSX:

If you’re a person that owns primarily Apple products, there’s nothing I can say here that will change your mind. You probably already have OSX running on your home computer or laptop and that’s not likely to change. And nor should it, necessarily. OSX and Windows 7 are very, very similar in look, function and performance. It’s under the hood where Apple has chosen to lock you down and Windows has always elected to let the user reign a bit more freely. We’re not talking about hardware here mind you, Apple is still the king of build quality for desktops and laptops (though just barely in the laptop category these days, with excellent offerings from Asus, Samsung and Lenovo available at lower price points without sacrificing esthetic). But in OS terms it really comes down to what you use your machine for. If you don’t mind sacrificing control for safety and you’re not much of a tinkerer, and you don’t mind paying extra for that build quality on the hardware side, then OSX may be your bag.

Especially if you’re shopping for a new computer.

For a new buyer or for someone looking to upgrade to a new device, the arrival of Windows 8 has created an interesting effect. For the first time, OSX looks more like Windows than…well, Windows. Combine that with the fact that the iPad and iPhone are driving people into Apple stores by the millions and it’s possible that OSX will pick up some new customers this year just on the familiarity of the interface compared to Microsoft’s newest offering.

Linux:

I used two Linux distributions this year, not counting Android and Chrome OS, Ubuntu and JoliOS. Where Linux used to be the scary, arcane OS choice of perceived basement dwelling geeks, distributions like Ubuntu, Linuxmint, and JoliOS (based on the Ubuntu kernel) have become so user friendly and similar in feel to the more common Windows and Mac OS that using one of them should scare no one anymore. Especially since they’re free, constantly updated and incredibly secure. If you’ve got an older PC of any form factor and you want to breathe some new life into it without attaching any cost, Ubuntu or Linuxmint would be the way to go. If you’ve used an Android device before, you already know how to install software in a Linux environment and for daily use the feel of UIs like Unity for Ubuntu is very familiar for Windows OSX users.

iOS:

It’s grown up. Sometimes in unpleasant ways. I love the advances that have been made in the app ecosphere, especially with respect to the productivity side of things. The introduction of multi-touch app switching and and a drop down notification center are welcome additions to the UI. But…
Apple, I know you don’t like Google very much right now. But your customers do. Eliminating the native Youtube and Google Maps apps was stupid and selfish and anti-consumer. Grow up. You are the world class tech company right now. Please act more like it and less like a petulant spoiled toddler. If you were my kid I’d put you on time out until you learned how to play with others.

Android:

On a phone it doesn’t get any better. Android 4.1 introduced Project Butter which makes the UI smoother than iOS, finally. It also introduced Google Now, which takes the digital personal assistant concept that Siri was touted as and turns it into a subtle, beautiful and brilliant background tool that serves up information as you need it.

On a tablet…

Again, I feel more like I’m using a computer on an Android tablet than I do on the iPad. But the app ecosphere for tablets just isn’t there. Upscaling phone apps doesn’t cut it, developers need to show Android the same love they’ve given iOS. There are more Android users by far than iOS users on phones, that ration would be the same for tablets if developers figured out how to make the tablet experience truly great. Aside from the Nexus 7, I can’t recommend any Android tablet over the iPad, and that has nothing to do with the OS.

Chrome OS:

I think this is the shape of things to come. Everything in the cloud and a web browser. My time with a Chromebook is why, when I bought a new iPad, I bought the one with the lowest available storage. I don’t need that much local storage on a portable computer anymore. Google was smart to introduce a browser to Chrome OS this summer; it makes the platform instantly more familiar. If you’re a person who uses a computer exclusively for the internet, or can learn to use productivity apps like Drive or SkyDrive instead of desktop equivalents like Office then there’s no reason a Chromebook shouldn’t be in your home or backpack. With the second generation of Chrome OS machines coming in cheaper and with better chips, I would recommend this platform without reservation to anyone looking for an inexpensive way to do day to day basic computing and nothing else. If you’re into heavy photo editing, programming etc. it’s not there yet. We have to wait for the internet to catch up.

Windows 8:

It’s out, tech pundits seem either torn or to hate it outright, and average users seem to love it or be indifferent to it’s changes. It’s my pick for best all around OS this year.

First, lets talk about all the hate.

By way of an example…

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols over at ZDNet is someone that I usually really enjoy reading. I always found his pieces to be well thought out, balanced without shying away from stating definitive opinions and overall incredibly insightful. I got piqued to Linux because of an article he wrote last year. But he, like some other writers at that site and pundits from around the tech community are definitively and objectively wrong when it comes to the piling on they’re giving 8.

I know, I know, you’re going to say that deciding not to like an OS is a subjective choice. You’re wrong too. Sometimes things are a tie. Most of the time they’re not. Most of the time, one thing is better than another and if you can’t explain coherently why you don’t agree with something being assessed as better, your opinion carries no weight in the discussion.

Windows 8 is like that.

First, it’s designed to run on older hardware than 7. Which means, measure for measure, if you’re using it on current gen tech, you’re going to see performance improvements.

That’s objectively better.

Second, it incorporates things from the tablet world into the desktop/laptop that are much needed, like a unified email inbox without installing third party software. That’s better.

A version of Internet Explorer that, if I wasn’t so buried in the Google ecosystem I would actually use everyday, every time I reached for a browser. Immeasurably better.

Built in security software in the form of MSE tied into Windows Defender (which, by the way has been significantly less obnoxious than it was in Vista or 7)

There’s nothing missing from 8 that I used in Windows 7 and a whole bunch of new goodies present that improve the user experience and mirror our data habits from the mobile world.

You’ll hear howling about the missing Start button. It’s not missing, it’s still there, in the bottom left corner waiting for you to hover a finger or a mouse pointer over it before showing itself. That took me about 5 minutes to figure out. (It’s also in the same place it’s always been on your keyboard.) Instead of a search field in a Start Menu, the Start Screen doubles as your search field. Touch the Start button and start typing and the integrated search will show you the number of results it found in all of your settings and apps, or you can just tap your browser button and have it perform the search there instead of you launching your browser first.

8 takes away nothing from 7 and adds useful functionality and highlights everyday data in an attractive and user friendly way.

Does it work better on a touch screen? Absolutely. Even better with a two monitor setup, because then you can have your Start Screen with its big touchable live tiles on your touch interface and your classic desktop on your second monitor. But neither of those things are required to make the Windows 8 experience objectively better than Windows 7 was.

I think that the hate is coming from the fact that, like Apple, Microsoft has fanboys too. And those fanboys have always maintained that the Apple makes computers for your mom or your kids, but Windows is for real work. Windows 8 still does all of the real work, but it looks like it was designed to be fun, and to a certain percentage of expert users, that’s going to grate. But every single person that I’ve talked to about this in the last month, who doesn’t work in tech; the people who use a computer the way most of us do, for browsing and pictures and work and games and media; those people almost universally enjoy Windows 8 more than 7.

Odds are you will too.

The problem Microsoft faces is that, as good as 8 is, it does present a learning curve to casual users. They have to get better tutorials out there and better marketing in place to explain what 8 is, or people simply won’t upgrade or will be frustrated initially when they do. When I first installed Windows 8, I hated it. It was an earlier RC version, and I quickly went back to 7. Now that I’ve used the finished product (the RTM) for a couple of months, those frustrations are gone, and I love using my computer again. 7 was the most functional OS Microsoft had made, Windows 8 is the most fun.

Conclusion

It’s been a really volatile year for tech. Mobile has exploded, again. Lawsuits are the order of the day rather than innovation or competition. The choices you can make in a home computer, laptop, tablet, phone, or some sort of hybrid are more daunting than they’ve ever been.

For 2012 here’s my final tally.

Desktop: Windows 8 AIO, touch enabled.

Laptop: Medium use: Asus, Samsung, or Lenovo touch enabled Ultrabook running Windows 8.
Light use: Samsung Chromebook.

Tablet: Still the iPad.

Phone: Platform: Android 4.1 or higher (4.2 is out for some devices)
Hardware: Samsung Galaxy Series, or Nexus devices

OS: Older Hardware: Ubuntu, Linuxmint
Current Gen Hardware: Windows 7/OSX Mountail Lion
New Hardware: Windows 8. With a bullet.

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.

Getting Full Utility Of It Isn’t All That Intuitive

ChromeOS should be the simplest possible UI a person could ask for. You already know how to use a web browser, and Chrome is simpler than most in that it merges the Google search bar and the address bar into one field. But certain things that every user takes for granted as out of the box standards actually require a bit of tinkering to enable.

For example:

The Webcam

I do a lot of video chats. Between Skype, Facebook, G-Chat, and the few contacts I still have on Live Messenger, I probably use my webcam for at least 20 minutes a day, everyday. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but when three-quarters of the services you use for a daily task can’t detect your webcam, that’s a problem.

It’s an easy fix; simply disable the default Flash Player in the plugins menu (Pepper Flash) and everything works. But to even learn to do that I had to search around on a couple of forums and then go through a 3 step process that included changing the settings on the Universal Flash Plugin. I’ve heard that the Pepper Flash issue has been worked out in ChromeOS 17, but I haven’t bothered to re-enable it, as it didn’t add any functionality and originally proved to be a pain.

I know my way around a computer and how to do an effective work search. A lot of people don’t and, since this is billed as an out of the box solution for people who aren’t all that tech savvy, the idea that I have to tamper with the default settings just to get the basics working with the services I’m used to is going to be a major road block for most users.

The Apps Ecosphere Is Pure Chaos

I love Chrome. I tell all of my friends to ditch Firefox in its favor on a regular basis. But, most of the reasons I love Chrome are never discovered by those who do take my advice. Google, you have to remember that Microsoft has trained the vast majority of users to see a web browser as just that. A browser. Not a doer. Throwing that Chrome Store icon on the home page is only useful if people understand what it’s for. A lot of them don’t.

But…

Let’s say a Chromebook lands in the eager hands of someone who does know that Chrome has a range of capability not usually found in other browsers. They fire up the Chrome Store and start pecking around for the best options to make their new device as versatile and useful as possible. You need that to happen, so that people will recommend the Chromebook to their friends.

So why, Google, do you not have a Chromebook section in the store? You know what average users are going to want to do with a computer. Why not, in the interests of making the service more user-friendly and thus more buyable, invest a bit of time and resources into a constantly updated list of the very best apps and extensions that the average new Chromebook owner is going to want to install?

People read articles decrying the lack of functionality of this device class. I know that lack is simply mythological; you  know it too. Why not counteract the single biggest reason people don’t buy the machine; people telling them what it can’t do, by showing them the very best of what it can  do?

Usability Is Limited In Odd And Varied Ways

So we know that we can’t use legacy software like Photoshop or Microsoft Office and, for the most part, decent substitutes abound. But, for example, iMovie works much better for editing large video files than anything I’ve found in the Chrome Store thus far. Since I sometimes have to do video editing, I’d like to be able to use that from time to time. So Google came out with a solution; Chrome Remote Desktop. It’s basically the Chrome version of LogMeIn, except with less latency, which is super impressive for a beta. What’s less impressive is its totally arbitrary but crippling limitation; a connection time limit that can only waived on the remote terminal. That means that I can be happily working away in Photoshop on my Chromebook (yay!) but then have all of my productivity come crashing to a halt when the remote machine I’m working on is prompted to continue giving access permission and there’s no one on the receiving end to give it!

Aarghh.

But that shouldn’t be a big deal; there are tons of terrific web apps that can duplicate the functionality of my legacy native applications. For example, Pixlr Editor, which works like a simple man’s Photoshop (and even opens .psd files). Think Gimp,, but without the learning curve. And it’s in the Chrome Store, which means it should be fully compatible with the Chromebook.

But it’s not.

I open a new tab, fire up Pixlr, get prompted to upload a file to edit and….fail. I click the button and the site freezes because it can’t see that I have any kind of local storage. This is an app that is utterly vital to me if I’m going to use my Chromebook to the exclusion of other portable devices, and I can’t upload or save images to or from it.

And this isn’t an isolated incident. It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while I run into an app or extension that works just fine in the Chrome browser on my desktop, but goes cross-eyed and blithers like an idiot when confronted by a Chromebook.

Google, take a look at a list of your top 100 rated productivity apps. Go through that list and make sure that every single one of them works seamlessly with the file storage on ChromeOS. If you don’t you will never be able to market these as an effective and desirable laptop replacement.

So Why Do I Have A Desktop?

Like I said, I have no choice. The few limitations to the Chromebook’s functionality that exist are painfully damaging to my daily productivity, especially the lack of native support for Pixlr. So I installed Ubuntu on the SSD and, when I need to do something that ChromeOS simply can’t do, I switch operating systems. Luckily, because the boot up time is so fast on Chromebooks, switching between the two systems is about as quick as launching a program on a traditional OS. But I shouldn’t have to run two operating systems on one machine in order to get the full functionality of one machine.

Most users either won’t know how to set up a dual-boot or won’t want to and, until, ChromeOS can do everything on its own that my Chromebook can do with a backup OS, it’s not going to gain mainstream acceptance.

Which is a shame because it really would be a brilliantly simple mobile solution for most people.

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.

The vast majority of consumers fall into what I call the baseline user class. They own at least one full computer (desktop/laptop) likely a smartphone and maybe (a very slim percentage so far but growing) a tablet of some sort.Maybe they do a bit of gaming but mostly they surf the internet, watch cat videos on YouTube, get a bit of work done and post embarrassing pictures of themselves and others on Facebook. That is the vast, vast majority of users. I’ve tried to explain to those of my friends that fall into this category how to use tools like Bittorrent to acquire free (or stolen, depending on the laws of the jurisdiction you happen to live in) content, but it mostly falls on incapable ears. Gone are the halcyon days of piracy through simple channels like Napster and Kazaa. Pirating in the modern era is much more efficient but also requires a bit more specialized knowledge and effort, two things that the baselines lack when it comes to entertainment.

When the average user thinks about digital content, it usually comes in convenient but paid for and licensed forms like iTunes, Pandora, Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon. The vast, vast majority of consumers pay for every single piece of digital content they consume. Sure, the way they’ve chosen to consume it means scaled down profits for content producer but, as Republicans and Tea Baggers love to remind everyone, the market determines value, not whatever you think something should be worth.

So why SOPA?

Power, control, censorship and a deep misunderstanding of the technological proficiency of the people who actually understand how the internet in general and piracy in particular work.

Congress believes, by virtue of the authority granted to them by those who’ve elected them, that they have power. The entertainment industry believes, by virtue of its billions of dollars in revenue, that they have power. The supporters of SOPA who aren’t tied to either of those spheres believe, by virtue of their influence over daily life on the internet (see GoDaddy) that they have power.

And they are all correct. But it is not true power, because it is utterly dependent on a combination of our tolerance and apathy, two traits which are mercifully shrinking within the populace at large.

Congress, for example, is filled with people who care not a bit for the desires of those who voted them into power. They care, almost exclusively, about pushing the agenda of their political party. They care about winning. But they can only do so if they are allowed to continue holding office, so they have to walk a tightrope between their own desires and not doing anything that the lowest common denominator of their electorate will find undesirable. Their power is derived from us and they can only exercise control over us to the extent that we allow it. At least in four year blocks.

Large service and content providers like those within the entertainment industry are subject to the same limitations. Yes, their money equates directly to power and influence. But they can only continue to exercise those advantages if we continue to give them money. Which is why the passage of SOPA is so important to them. They are trying to force us to pay for their schlock whether we care to or not and, really, it’s hard not to foresee a scenario where one of the major content providers decides that something hosted on Netflix somehow violates a copyright agreement and uses the broad powers of SOPA to blockade the legitimate services we choose to use in lieu of more expensive options. They want to dictate terms to the market. The reason that they’re being so brazen in their measures this time is, ironically, that the very same limitation that should make them think twice about so joyously biting the hands that feed them (our ability to effect a boycott of their services and thus drain them of all of their resources) is exactly the thing that we won’t exercise. Time and again (with the exception of the recent GoDaddy mass exodus) we’ve shown that when principle clashes with convenience, convenience wins. It is a frustrating flaw of the human condition.

However….

What both governments and corporations fail to understand is that individual mastery of technology within our culture has become such that, within the relatively small percentage of the population that doesn’t  fall into the baseline category of users, there exist large pockets of individuals who have the power, from a keyboard, to thwart the concerted efforts of Big Business and Big Government with relative ease, especially when it comes to the field of internet censorship.

Case in point:

This morning I read this article that talks about a browse extension for Firefox called Soapy. Soapy is a tiny little script that can be downloaded and installed by anybody, into Firefox on any computer, by means of simply dragging the script file to your browser window. And its sole purpose is to change the way your browser looks up websites that have been blocked by SOPA and instantly navigate around ISP enabled blocks to allow you access to your content.

Before SOPA has even been passed, someone has found a way to render it moot. And this is just the first blow; this is just one guy, typing away from the comfort of his home office. Others will follow. It will become easier and easier for the baseline user to access tools that free them from the oppression of corporate and government interests, and that is a very good thing.

But why is it so easy?

Because the people who seek to control and censor online content don’t understand that  the internet isn’t a thing that they can contain within the laws of the land. It isn’t something that you can control. The internet is more than cables and connections and websites. It is, like Soylent Green, people.

And people, whether en masse or as individuals, will always find a way to remain free.

Even from the clutches of Sony Entertainment and the Tea Party.

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. 

I’ll give you an example. For now, cloud storage is tricky. The amount of storage that services like Dropbox, box.net, iCloud, Amazon CloudDrive etc. give you for free aren’t enough to house all of your data in one place. So you’ve got a couple of choices: a) spread all of your data across multiple platforms and develop some sort of service/content type filing system…or b) start paying for storage.

I suck at staying organized and, if there’s a free alternative to paying for something, I tend to explore it thoroughly before pulling out the credit card. So what I’ve done is use my home media (desktop, laptops, external drives, PS3, etc.) as a hub from which to share all of my local content with my mobile devices.  I have a file browser app on my tablet that lets me search and download files from my home computer; I stream all of my music and videos through one of about 3 different apps, depending on the day. I remote access legacy software on my home devices from my Chromebook when Chrome OS or Ubuntu can’t get the job done.

Now.

Imagine a world where there are no desktops; no traditional laptops; and no media players being purchased because we’ve abandoned them in favor of mobile “replacements.”

Do companies put money into products that people aren’t buying?

If we stop buying desktops (or, since that seems inevitable, full power laptops) we lose our high-powered home cloud substitute and are forced to rely on pay-to-use cloud storage services, which I imagine would get suddenly far more expensive. If we stop buying media players we risk the total elimination of hard copy media and become subservient to services like iTunes and Netflix and their attendant flaws (you know what sucks? Paying for a digital copy of a movie when I buy the Blu-Ray and not being allowed to stream that file to any other device. I’ll take ripped disks into .avi format any day of the week, thanks very much) If we only play games like Angry Birds, people stop making games like Skyrim.

Smartphones and tablets are brilliant, incredibly useful devices, but they aren’t ready to replace our primary tools. If we pretend they are, we condemn ourselves to a device lineup that only somewhat meets our demands, with no alternatives. Companies will not spend money designing things they know you won’t buy.

Please don’t doom us all by blowing your whole paycheck on another Asus tablet when you have a perfectly good one sitting in your briefcase.

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.

But no more.

The last two years has been a search for me; I’ve been looking for mobile computing perfection. There have been laptops and netbooks (about 4 in total, not counting Chromie), an embarrassing number of smartphones, and 4 tablets.  Oh yeah, and an iMac, which is pretty much just used as a hub for content to stream out to other devices. Which, in hindsight, I could have done with a much less fancy Windows desktop.

I’ve come full circle to where I should have landed in the first place. Between my Android powered smartphone and Chromebook I have the best mix of mobile functionality possible; there’s simply nothing I can add by purchasing a new device. And I’m fine with that.

For now.

For two years I’ve searched for the best devices within specific product types. Those product types (smartphone, tablet, ultraportable computer) were all new and exciting and each advance to any of them awoke my Gotta-Have-It bug. Now, we’ve plateaued for a bit. But it won’t last. Each new advance has within it the seeds of the next quantum leap. In a year or two an entirely new device type will emerge and change everything, again. Hint: based on the last decade, it’ll probably come from Apple. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Apple has created the shape of consumer electronics; everyone else is just filling in the blanks to their outline.

Whatever that new technology proves to be, I’m sure I’ll be at the front of the line, and another 2-3 year period of atrocious excess will begin.

But, today, I’m content.

Except….I wonder if digital cameras have gotten better…

Also, Windows 8 can’t come soon enough. I wants it, my precious, my….

Never mind.

After months of training myself to rely entirely on web apps for my daily computing, the main event has finally arrived. With the help of one of my wife’s co-workers, who has the distinct advantage of not being a Canadian resident, I now have a Samsung Series 5 Chromebook in my hot little hands.

It is awesome.

I’ve read a lot of very mixed reviews of this device over the last few months, mostly from tech sites that seem to have forgotten that different doesn’t mean bad. There’s been the expected histrionics over the lack of on-board storage, the loud but erroneous squawking about the limitations of web apps, and the constant refrain of, “Why would I pay $350 bucks for this, when I get a low level laptop running Windows for the same price and then do everything from a Chrome browser anyway?”

Rubbish. All of it.

For those who aren’t aware, Chromebooks are a six month old notebook offering from Google, meant to compete with traditional desktop OSs like Windows or Mac OS. Except, not really. They’re actually something entirely different. And that’s where the problems with adoption of this technology have come into play. They shouldn’t be competing with traditional laptops; they’re an entirely new device type.

Chromebooks look like laptops. The Series 5 has a design and build quality that are reminiscent of a slightly smaller Macbook. They have all of the normal features you’d associate with a laptop. Screen, keyboard, ports, slots, trackpad, etc… But they are decidedly not laptops. It’s best to think of them as a very sexy portable version of one of those dumb terminals people used to work from in the late 70′s. The hardware is simply a portal to the web, rather than a place to host software. As such, we’re given a very thin client operating system in the form of Chrome OS. Chrome is…well it’s the Chrome browser, tweaked to allow for rudimentary file management and local media playback. But Chrome has never really just been a browser, which is probably why it’s managed to gain 25% market share over the last 3 years. Chrome is an operating system disguised as a browser. Through the use of extensions and web applications that mimic the functionality of native software, Chrome turns browser tabs into productivity applications. And it is very, very good..

So if Chromebooks are a portal, and Chrome OS is an operating system, then the real “computer” here is the web itself. The browser becomes a way to shape the web into something meant for productivity rather than just consumption while the hardware simply shapes the performance and duration of that productivity.

So let’s talk about hardware for a second. The Samsung Series 5 is a very nice looking machine. It has a 12.1″ form factor, which makes it just a bit smaller than the 13 inch Macbook Pro. I make that comparison mostly because it has far more of an Apple aesthetic to it than that of a PC. Beautifully rounded in all the right places and sporting a full size button-less touchpad, it also has a heft and texture that make it feel like a far more expensive machine than the $350 USD that I paid for it. Some of the features that accompany that hardware are a ridiculously long-lasting battery (at the time of this writing I’ve been working steadily for about 5 hours and I still have 38% power remaining) almost instant wake from sleep, and a boot up time of around 8 seconds. Comparing those conveniences to the comforts you’d receive from a similarly priced Windows netbook and the hardware starts to look a bit more valuable. My only complaint so far is that, with only 2GB of RAM, performance has felt sluggish the odd time. An OS this thin really shouldn’t lag at all, unless running multiple videos, and there have been a few times today when the Series 5 felt under-powered.

So, hardware mostly good.

The real test here is the software. Can the average person get by using only web apps and online storage? I’m leaning towards mostly yes. Today I edited several documents in Google docs, cropped and annotated some images, watched a few streaming videos (performance was a bit laggy if I tried to watch anything over 720p) did some design work for a Facebook page and typed up this article in WordPress. I also dipped into my book collection using the Kindle Cloud app, listened to music using my uploaded collection on Google Music and played a bit of Angry birds. For anything more complex (at one point I wanted to download a few files over bittorrent) I found an excellent remote desktop extension and performed the task through the browser on my iMac at home. I would say that, if you’re a standard user, (browsing, office productivity, communication,  social media, and media consumption) then a Chromebook could very easily replace a conventional laptop as your primary portable.

With one caveat.

You have  to have persistent internet. Because everything you’ll do on a Chromebook revolves around web use, you have to be reliably connected. I’m lucky enough that my mobile provider has an unlimited data plan so whether I have wifi access or not is moot. If you don’t have good internet access, I’d say steer clear. That being said, considering how much of our average computer use depends on online connectivity, I’d make the same recommendation when speaking about any computer purchase.

If you’re a power user; if you have to do intensive media design work of any stripe, or work in an Enterprise environment or you’re a hardcore PC gamer; I’d say this probably isn’t a machine for you.

Yet.

Web apps will get more prolific, the variety and quality of available tools will increase and we will all eventually move to this style of computing. It makes sense; I don’t need to install antivirus on this machine, I don’t need to worry about running out of storage space, and, when I inevitably upgrade a couple of years down the road to a Chromebook 2.0 (if it ever gets developed, adoption of this platform was utterly ruined by Google’s fumble of the marketing) setup of the new machine will be as simple as logging in with my Google credentials and all of my customizations and preferences will carry over.

My recommendation (so far) is this; if you don’t know whether you can get by on the Cloud alone, try it. Spend a month doing as much of your work as possible using just a Chrome browser. Familiarize yourself with the extensions and apps available and see if you can wrap your brain around the notion of never storing anything locally again. If you find, at the end of the month, that you haven’t really had to switch back to native applications all that often, then a Chromebook is probably going to be a good fit. You won’t be able to beat the battery life and overall system performance for the same cost, so you may as well jump into the experience. If, on the other hand, you find yourself consistently cursing and reaching for your Windows or Mac laptop, then it might be awhile before the Cloud has what you need to transition.

But keep trying anyway; eventually, this will just be the way things are done. May as well learn how to play in this sandbox early.

And Google, please, next time you’re going to market a brand new concept to people and you don’t want the tech pundits to ruin it for you, maybe try to launch it with a few less limitations in play. All of the file extension, file browsing and offline app issues people complained about when the Chromebooks first came out have been mostly fixed, thanks to an incredible update schedule, but you should have known that people would, you know, want some familiarity right out of the box, and you didn’t give them that.

Brilliant jump, lousy landing. And that makes me so sad.

It was cheap (for a smartphone), Android is organized in a way that’s much easier to manage than iOS and it has a few perks (like the notifications bar) that had been missing from my smartphone experience.

Again, for about five hours.

That’s how long it took for my battery to die. Which wasn’t itself a horrible thing; the 3GS had made me accustomed to charging my phone twice a day. But a funny thing happened when I plugged the phone in to charge for the first time.

It got hot. Intensely hot. Burned my daughter’s hand hot.

The tech lesson I learned that day was:

NEVER BUY ACER. 

Not even if it looks like a really, really good deal.

Just don’t.

When I got the phone back to the store for an exchange, we opened it up to discover that the SIM card had, in fact, melted.

But I’d still really, really loved the Android interface. So I did some research and bought was to be the first of way too many sweet bars of Android goodness; the Samsung Galaxy Captivate.

Around the same time, the iPad came out and, while I didn’t rush out to line up with the lemmings, its pull proved too powerful and soon enough I had one clutched in my hot little hands.

I bought it originally as an ebook reader. Which seems excessive in hindsight; the Kindle probably would have been a far more economical choice. Very quickly though I found reason after reason to pick up the tablet instead of my laptop. It was great for watching movies, listening to music, gaming (oh the early days of my love affair with Angry Birds and Lego Harry Potter) keeping the kids distracted long enough to make a coffee in the morning, etc. The iPad quickly became my default gadget of choice.

Between the Galaxy and the iPad I felt like I’d really nailed down the right gadgets for my mobile computing requirements.

So why, a little over a year later, am I now using a Nexus S and a Sony tablet? Because too much variety and punishing array of media coverage of every new device launch has turned mobile communications into the new crack cocaine. Even now, with absolutely nothing wrong with my current phone, I’m drooling at the prospect of the next Nexus release. I’m combing over my RSS feeds for any hint that the next iteration of the Tablet S will be arriving soon and in a unibody aluminum build.

This has become my train spotting. And it is very, very expensive.

The thing is, with each round of purchases, I’ve improved functionality and productivity with these tools.

So am I done?

To be continued…

The screaming landed me a free 3GS and there was much rejoicing in the land. At least by me. For about a week. The green dragon of envy had started to rear its ugly head each time I saw a stranger lovingly stroking the iPhone 4, you see, and I had to have one.

My own.

My precious.

Er…anyway.
So I shelled out the cash one weekend for the iPhone 4 and embarked on another passionate but doomed to be brief love affair. The 4 was/is a brilliant machine but, due to some carrier issues (I loathe Fido. More than anything. Even peas.) and some low level pressure from my charming (but by this point very tired of hearing me whine) wife, I decided to try out one of the ridiculously-cheap-but-don’t-get-kidnapped-in-the-woods-cause-your-phone-will-laugh-at-you providers that seem to have cropped up of late.

Porting my iPhone over to this service (which shall henceforth be referred to as…erm…Breeze) was apparently impossible, so my choices were to adopt one of their many (many) Android models (the enemy) take a step back to a Blackberry, or choose of one their few remaining and miserable looking…I guess dumbphones would be the only appropriate label.

I couldn’t bring myself to go completely over to the other side, so I settled for a Blackberry Curve which, if you’ve gotten used to a touchscreen, is kind of like using a watch for your whole life and then being told that you have to start carrying a sundial[i]. But, you know, it had BBM, and I had some friends at that point who were still dwelling in the sunless lands of physical keyboards.

The Curve (through no fault of its own, other than the fact that I felt like I was constantly hammering away at the world’s smallest nail with a cartoon hammer) and Breeze^tm along with it, lasted about a month. That’s how long it was before I had to go out of town and discovered exactly what a “Breeze^tm Zone consisted of.

I should mention at this point that, when I commit to something, I really commit. In the month that I’d been away from it, I’d sold my iPhone 4 on kijiji. So not only did I have to find a new provider but I also had to find a new phone; a prospect that was starting to get kind of expensive.

Which was how I wound up with my first Android handset.

The Acer Liquid E.

Shudder.

To be continued…

Sit down by the digital fire, children; I’d like to tell you a tale of the end of the world.

The conversation I’m having most often lately, and more with people who have some tech background, rather than those without, goes a little something like this:

Me:“Hey, I just found this new (insert product/service/minset towards technology here) and it’s awesome. It can do this, this and this, and it syncs up perfectly with all the trends we’re seeing with respect to the future of computing. You should try it.

Random friend with tech knowledge: ”But it doesn’t do this, and it’s not the way things have always been done and I don’t like it so FAILLLLLLLLL“

It’s an odd response, especially considering the source. Technology is, in this writer’s humble opinion, about what’s new and useful and how to get it into the hands of everyone whom it would be useful for. For people who have spent their entire lives dedicating themselves to developing or understanding technology and what it brings, to suddenly not want progress seems…

Ah, but technology is also incredibly fetishistic. The culture war between Mac fanboys and Windows fanboys¹ has been ample evidence of that. No matter what their interests, people are people and people don’t like change.

But change comes whether we will it or no, and those who don’t adapt are swept away.

So…

I’ve finally played around with Google Apps enough that I am ready to declare it my all-purpose productivity tool for…well everything I need to do at work.

Easy to use CRM so I never have to remember where I’m at with my clients on any given day? Covered.

Brilliant calendar app that allows people to follow a link to my Google Calendar and request an appointment in my free blocks of time? Yay!

Need to do some image editing on the fly and Gimp is giving me a headache? There’s an app for that too.

In fact there are so many customization options available that, if you’re a business owner and you’re still paying for software that doesn’t give you the versatility that you get with Google Apps for free, there is officially something wrong².

But it’s not just the obvious stuff that’s wowing me. I want to take a few minutes to talk about Google Docs itself.

There’s been some conversation in my circles about the things it can’t do. It doesn’t interpret formatting from Word or Pages (like inserted images into a text document) with perfect fidelity. You have to convert imported projects into the Google format before you can work with them online; otherwise you have to download to your desktop each time you want to work on something. It doesn’t have the rich feature set that a product like Office or iWork does.

I hate me a naysayer.

All those things are true. Docs does have issues with certain types of formatting, and the features aren’t as robust as when using Word or Powerpoint. But this complaint that you have to download files to work with them if you don’t want to convert them to Docs format strikes me as a wee petulant. The underlying complaint here seems to be, ‘how is that any different from Dropbox?”

The thing is, yeah, now you’re uploading content created elsewhere and scratching your head over letting Google convert it to a format it can use. But, when the Docs format or something like it becomes the way (and it will) you won’t be doing that. You’ll be starting and editing every document within your browser.

I used to write all my blog posts in a Word document, upload them to WordPress, and then spend hours screaming at my monitor while I tried to redo all of the beautiful formatting that WordPress had undone. There were nights I spent more time reformatting than I did writing.

You know what’s easier? Just writing the bloody articles in the in-browser editor. Everything I was used to doing in Word has a WordPress equivalent; I just had to learn what they were. I know, effort. But changing mentalities on that one issue made blogging much, much more enjoyable. My forehead was starting to get really veiny.

With Docs, there’s an even bigger incentive to learning a new game….collaboration.

I work in a field where it is a daily fact of life that some of my clients are located in different cities than me. But I still have to meet and work with them to produce a product that is acceptable to both of us. With Docs, here’s how that looks.

Yeah. I’m not a graphic artist. That’s why I like templates.

Now, both Word and Pages have a share button too, but the difference here is that Google wins on easy functionality. With the other productivity suites you have the option of “sharing” to a cloud storage service. By share they mean, ‘hey, if you set up your cloud storage service (like the painfully slow Skydrive) with shared folders, other people can log into your folders, download them, edit them, upload them again and then you can see what they’ve done! Whoooo!’

And that was awesome not too long ago.

But Docs, heh. It’s not even a comparison. That share button lets me open the document up to as many or as few people as I like. I can set permissions to read only or edit. So far, exactly the same as the other offerings. But…When I share that document, I can work on it, in real-time, with the people I’ve shared it with. Live. With chat.

Practical uses?

I’m working on a Facebook page design with a client. I share the presentation I’ve built, with that client, over docs. Now the two of us can, while talking, manipulate that presentation together, from two separate machines, until we end up with the result we like. IN REAL TIME. WITH NO DOWNLOADS.

Useful?

Maybe you’re a screenwriter and you’re working on a script with a friend. Maybe you’re an editor and you want to walk through a manuscript with your writer.

The ability to share and modify and collaborate in real-time is priceless and, in my opinion, one of the shining examples of how products like this can and will redefine productivity. And it’s the in-browser mentality, rather than virtual storage, that makes it possible. I like Dropbox and Sugarsync and like services. But really, they’re the equivalent of having a jump drive in the sky³. This, by contrast, is like having everything you’ll ever have work on, available anytime, instantly and with anyone from any browser.

Is Google Docs perfect? No. I’d like, especially from a company as resource and talent rich as Google, to see Docs play nicer with other formats. The issues that crop up are minor, but annoying and I’d like the option of adding media content from another format without the app choking on it.

But it’s free. And the more of us who find ways to use it, the more time and effort will be thrown into making it not a compatible  add-on, but a full replacement for the clunking behemoths of yesterday.

I like progress, especially when it looks like this.

¹ Which extends even to tablets which run neither OS. Which, you know, wow.

²If you have specialized requirements i.e. you’re a graphic artist, video editor etc. you’ll likely need to shine on just a bit longer until there are good online tools to replace your native applications. But it’ll come.
³Cloud storage is going to get really useful again as more than a media locker the second someone figures out how to turn my Dropbox folder into a bootable remote drive.

Thin is in. Or maybe I should say light is right.

The MacBook Air is no longer an object of ridicule in consumer circles. Amazon is launching a ridiculously light on storage tablet, built utterly around Cloud integration. The Chromebook¹ is settling into it’s groove as the first browser only OS. The days, it seems, of ever increasing HDD space and laptop bottoms that can scald the hair right off your legs, are over.

Or are they?

Intel is now touting its own sponsored line of Ultra Portables, starting with the Dell XPS 15z; a super light, specced out the gills PC that seems more than a little, uh, “inspired,” by the design of the MacBook Air.

Reading over the ad copy and seeing phrases like, “unmatched sophistication,” and, “uncomprimising² power;” the 15z is a machine that’s going after the Air in a way that no other PC has thus far. Microsoft and Intel have to know that the ultra thin, ultra trendy Air is sparking a bit more drool lately than, say, the latest Lenovo workhorse. Not necessarily because it’s better, but because it’s sexier.

But the phrase that Dell is has chosen for its prime real estate; the one that seems to be their tagline for this little venture, begs the questions: “Where exactly are we headed? and, What exactly do we need?”

The computer you need inside the laptop you want…

I left it big because, well, it’s a big statement, making big assertions and bigger assumptions.

The claim here is obvious. ‘We’ve built a machine that looks pretty much exactly like the one you’re so eager to throw a cool grand at³, only better, because it still has an optical drive and a real hard drive with more space than EVAR!!!! RAWF RAWF RAWF’

Bill Gates once said, quite famously⁴ that no one would ever need more than 640k of memory, a claim that, in hindsight is almost as laughable now as that old line from Charles H. Duell⁵, stating that everything that could be invented, had been invented. In 1899.

But…

While 640k is an indisputably low number, do I really need to carry around a terabyte of storage every time I leave my house? Hell, my laptop in 2003, a sturdy little IBM number with that stupid red trackball, only had 10 GB of storage and that did me just fine.

What changes in our habits in the last eight years have necessitated this storage overkill?

Lots and lots of high quality media consumption. And, let’s call a spade a spade, until iTunes really kicked the online media sales channel into gear, most of that high quality media consumption could be attributed to piracy, a habit that, while not necessarily in decline, is certainly getting prosecuted a lot more, resulting in a bit less enthusiasm.

The Cloud though, it’s going to change the way we consume that media. People are generally, slowly, getting used to the idea of having their photos hosted on services like Picasa or Facebook. Music streaming services like Grooveshark, Spotify and Google Music are getting people excited about the idea of all of their music living off of their hard drives, while Netflix and Apple TV are doing an excellent job getting us used to the idea of having unlimited access to our videos without actually owning them.

So. Eventually that’s just going to be the way. The adoption rate of those services is picking up at a breakneck pace; really the only hold out issue preventing people from jumping head first into a world of no more local storage is the question of security and how safe our work and personal documents are.

Since I’m pretty sure I could carry around the entire digital contents of the Library of Congress on a 64 GB flash card, you can’t really make the case to me that, if all of my media content is going to be hosted on web storage, I need 500GB of space to store my tax returns and short story collection. If I’m not watching DVDs anymore, and all of my music is beaming straight to my speakers from a server farm in Palo Alto, why do I need an optical drive?

My money is on  the Chromebook format being the one that ultimately wins the day. It’ll take some getting used to, but light, minimalist and entirely web powered is going to make much more sense very soon to a whole lot of people. Even the Air; a hybrid of the two concepts with just enough storage space to placate the more cautious among us, but really built to take advantage of Apple’s new iCloud service, is a great stepping stone for a lot of people.

The idea of a Super Portable who’s main differentiation from it’s excellent competition is that it’s clinging to the past as tightly as it can? That just shows that Dell, Intel and any others who follow suit don’t really understand the market anymore. I’m not saying Apple is the expert here but, if you’re going to copy their model you have to look at the strategy behind what they’ve done. Look at what’s happening in the world of third party content and understand that the days of local storage are coming to an end. Once online security hits the comfort threshold that people need, it’ll all be over.

When I say, tongue in cheek, “One Format To Rule Them All,” I don’t mean one manufacturer or one specific product type; I like diversity. But, just like laptops, over time, all started to take on the same basic shape and feature sets that differentiated them entirely from desktops, so too will the next generation machine be…different, which Dell’s new baby is not. The next generation machine will be cloud based, lightning fast and have batteries that last for days; even while connected to wifi.

And that is a future I’m completely fine with.

¹Not to mention competing open source operating systems like JoliCloud or the soon to be launched, HTML5 only, Carbyn, which looks to be considering the development of much more offline integration than Chrome OS or Joli OS.

²Emphasis mine.

³Which, you know, any computer manufacturer has to be giddy about, especially in the era of steadily decreasing laptop prices. Thanks Netbooks.

⁴And now, sadly, quite debunked.

⁵Also debunked. I liked the world better without Snopes and Wikipedia; say what you will about the information age, I liked believing nonsense that no one could really disprove.