mobility

Mobile technology is great, but it’s very hard to find _the_ right mobile tool. I now have two mobile phones, an HP Ipaq PDA, my Asus EEE 7″ subnotebook, a Dell X200 12.1″ (sub)notebook, an Acer Aspire 3610 15.4 ” notebook, and counting. Frankly, this is getting ridiculous. None of these tools suits even close to all my needs, and by now I would need a suitcase to lug them all around!

Of course, I could always try to choose one of these tools, and stick to it. Well, this is what happens then: here I am, using Skype on my Asus to call my good friend Mark Aakhus in the US via the Tilburg University wifi campus network. It works, but somehow it doesn’t quite seem the optimal mobile solution 🙂

Funnily enough, Mark who just happened to be online when I demonstrated my Asus, co-edited this book: Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance.… Read more...

Since yesterday, I am the happy owner of an Asus EEE laptop. No, it’s not yet another machine with more cycles, megabytes, and features. Rather, the philosophy is “less is more”. EEE stands for “Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play”, and as far as I am concerned, the machine fully lives up to this promise.

My version is the 4G-Surf: only a 7″ display, 512 Mb RAM, and 4 Gb solid state disk. The price? Less than 350 euros for all this goodness! There is a huge backorder for the newest models (4 Gb SSD with webcam, 8 Gb SSD), but the 4G-Surf is already definitely good enough for your daily basic mobile needs. See also my post on GrowingPains for some reflections on the impact of this development.… Read more...