Internet Stick & Laptop or iPad with 3G

I had been looking at purchasing an Internet Stick for some time, but as usual the main carriers in Canada don’t offer anything competetive in pricing.  You pay over $200.00 for the stick if you don’t want a contract, and under a contract you’re paying well over $50.00 per month for as little as 3gb of data transfer.

Then came along a few competetive carriers, namely Wind Mobile and a couple of others.

Wind has been agressivly looking for customers so offer some excellent deals, like the one right now where you get unlimited data transfer for only $25.00 per month plus you buy the stick for around $100.00 and get a free Mifi adapter (turns your laptop & stick into a Wifi hotspot for other devices).  Seemed like an excellent deal, so I was planning on getting this however most Wind stores were sold out of it so the next step was to order it online directly.

Then Apple went and had a sale on their iPads on Cyber Monday for $50.00 or so off.  Not a bad deal, and probably one of the best unless you buy a refurbished unit.

So which one to buy?

Taking my netbook had quite a few advantages:

• Portable
• Power of a semi-notebook
• Access to VPN to the office

But also has disadvantages:

• Battery life
• Need to carry an adapter everywhere I go (man purse/satchel – here I come!)
• Battery life
• Battery life
• Battery life
• Maybe need an inverter for the car

I could buy a higher capacity battery, but that means spending at minimum another $100.00 which will get me around 8 hours so long as I dim the screen, perhaps slow the already slow processor even more.  I might even need to buy a inverter for my car so that I can plug the laptop into the inverter and into the cigarette lighter – another $100.00.  My car is slowly a tangle of cables – not something that my wife would like, nor would I.

The iPad was on sale, so that was my next step.

Pros and Cons:

• Relatively light
• One small package (versus the laptop + cables + inverter + stick)
• Can do most of what I could do on a laptop – access to Google DOCS anywhere
• Small adapter but needs AC and not sure if there is a car adapter but claims 8-10 hours of battery life
• Don’t need a stick!

OK so the iPad is quite a bit more and I already have a perfectly fine netbook so only would be spending $200.00 or so.

As you would have guessed – I did buy the iPad.

I’ve been using it for about 3-weeks now and have mixed feelings about it – not buyer remorse entirely, but is it really making me as productive as the netbook + internet stick option would?  I’m not quite yet ready to report on how good (or bad) the iPad is, I need to use it for at least another month or two. 

In the meantime, if you are considering an iPad you may want to wait either for the iPad 2 due out in April 2011 or later or for anyone of the many tablets due out from companies like RIM, HP and even Microsoft sometime in 2011.

Netbook Personal Productivity – A Year Later

About a year ago I write a post entitled – Increase Your Personal Productivity With A NetBook.  As a year has now gone by, I thought I’d write an update to the post and share with you my experiences with my netbook.

I purchased the Acer 8.9″ netbook.  It came with Windows XP, 1gb memory and a 160gb hard drive.  In addition to this, I’ve got several external HDs kicking around so purchased cases for these so that I could use them in addition to the HD that comes with the netbook.

I installed my ancient copy of Microsoft Office along with several other productivity applications, some personal applications like Quicken, some research tools, music and even installed a few graphics applications just to see if the netbook could keep up with the memory requirements and speed.

I also use the netbook to connect to work, and use it most often when I’m in bed with a lapdesk.

Previous to getting the net book, I’d do work on my full-size laptop.  The specs were about the same but it was running a 15.6″ screen.

The other plus with my net book is that there are 3 USB ports – a lot of room for expansion for external CD/DVD.  There are two slots for SDHC cards as well – one which is used for storage so I can plug in my 16gb card and use it like a hard drive and the other slot can also be used for storage but is intended to be used as a SDHC slot to pull off images or other data.

The other thing you’ll find with most net books is that you do get an external monitor port.  From time-to-time if I have a need, I’ll plug an external monitor to the port and use it instead of the smaller screen.

Though there are some disadvantages to the smaller screen – mainly if you’ve got bad eyes or find it difficult to read small print it might be difficult and not all apps run well on the smaller screen.

Contrary to popular belief, I’ve been able to do quite a bit more than surf on the net book.  I used it quite a bit from basic word processing to managing my bank accounts and investments.  I also use it routinely to VPN into work when I’m out and need to provide support, or even when I’m at home.

In fact I find that I use my primary laptop even less now that I have a netbook.

Where the real productivity gains have come in is the ability to use something like Google Docs – I can work in the cloud and access that data anywhere.  Because I’m running an Atom processor with 1gb memory, you don’t want to run CPU intensive applications so not having to start-up Office (Excel or Word) each time is a great boon – I can connect virtually instantly to Google Docs wherever I am that has WiFi – at home or out.  I’ve been tempted to purchase an Internet Stick – but having looked at how I use the net book I found that spending $150.00 on the stick plus anywhere from $30 to $70 per month for fees just wasn’t worth it.

Running apps on the netbook is very smooth – including a few of the graphics applications that I run.  These are Adobe PhotoShop (only for basic graphic file editing) and an old version of Jasc PaintShopPro (now part of the Corel family of products).  These are both memory and CPU intensive programs but I’ve had no problems running them on the Acer.

Besides business applications, I also run several research tools to mine data on the internet.  I’ve had absolutely no problems running these tools – they run just as well as they did (and do) on my full-size laptop.

There is an excellent post at Netbook Ace – Google Gears + Your Netbook = Productivity Powerhouse.  I haven’t installed Google Gears on my net book, I would like to read up on it a bit more but this sounds like something that will help me get the most out of my net book.  I like the fact that I could cache my documents and even run apps locally and have them sync when I connect.

One of my hobbies is writing, so being able to do this anytime would be great – I could write anywhere and not have to use the dreaded Notepad or my next least favourite, Textpad — both are good, Textpad is better but nothing beats a good word processing application.

Overall I am really happy with my netbook, it’s performed very well and continues to perform well.  It’s a true portable computer that I can take anywhere and if combined with 3g service is usable everywhere there is service.

In order to maximize my productivity, I’ve also just registered for Zoho.  You can find them at http://www.zoho.com – they offer a suite of online products that you can use as an individual user for free.  There are fees if they will be used for business.  One of the modules or apps in the Zoho suite is an e-mail program.  I will also try this out as it looks pretty good from the description on their blog… in fact the entire suite of products look pretty good.

Check out their blog, as they offer a lot of information about the various components.

I will report on Zoho in a future post once I get a chance to try it out.

Back to the netbook – would I buy another netbook?  Without even thinking about it!