I finally found a setup that works for me. It is as follows: My google calendar account is the heart of the operation. That’s where my different calendars are all based. On my iPhone I installed the excellent app called Nemussync. While neither the website nor the utility is super flashy it works beautifully out of the box and does two-way synchronisation between your iPhone and your google account. Setting it up for automatic updates can’t be done from the GUI yet, but it’s a fairly benign little hack (you basically just have to copy a .plist file to a directory, it’s on the nemussync page under FAQ).
Now that the iPhone is hooked up to the google account all we need to do is set up some hefty syncing between ical and the google account. Google calendar now supports CalDav which means that you can sync your calendars both ways for free. Google even supplies a nifty little tool to accomplish this. The process is really quite seamless and my experiences thus far are really positive. Thumbs up to all the macheads at google who make this possible.

Oh… and screw you mister Jobs and your overpriced MobileMe disaster.

I’ve been following the netbook market since way before the phrase netbook was even applied to these little beauties so I thought I’d give it a go:

My perfect netbook:

• Processor:Intel Atom (the one they pretty much all use these days)
• Screen:10.2 inch LED like the one on my wind. I still catch myself wishing that the bezel on the wind would be a tad narrower. I think they could have squeezed an 11″ screen in here if they’d wanted to. I know that at this point it’s just a convention and also Microsoft helps limit innovation in the space with their pretty rigid requirements for netbooks. But the more screen real estate the better. I think the resolution could be bumped to 1280×768 or something similar, but I don’t think any 10″ netbooks have that combination.
• Keyboard:HP Mininote. I’m satisfied with the keyboard on the wind. I’m typing on it right now and it’s performing great. I haven’t used my macbook really since I got the wind, but the Mininote allegedly blows everyone out of the water in this aspect. Might as well benefit.
• Wifi:Draft-N module on the newest Eee series. This is not a deal breaker for me either way. 802.11g would fill my needs as well.
• Storage:Hard drive for me please. I appreciate SSD, but my tragic experiences with the original Eee and the constant space constraints have jaded me. A SATA drive feels just as snappy in real world usage scenarios as the discount SSDs.
• Other connectivity:Card reader (nice to have, not important), express card slot (nice to have, but I’ve never used one up till now), 3G module (Definitely a plus. Would eliminate the need for tethering)
• Styling:I really like the wind’s styling. I’d remove all the stupid LEDs, and make the entire thing matte instead of glossy. And black. I’m not big on all the casual colour-schemes.

I think that’s all I could come up with for my ideal netbook.

One of the perks is that we get to test out Klaus’ neat 3g service from 3. Emma and I both brought our laptops but thanks to the sweet little feature in osx called internet connection sharing we can both be online independently. The speed is quite decent also. I ran a speedtest at speedtest.net and the results are seen below:

the 3g service from 3 strutting its stuff

At my work we are seeing a rapidly increasing interest in mobile broadband as well, but it’s still mostly seen as a supplement to bring with you when you’re away from home.

Mobile tech superman James Kendrick started a discussion over on jkontherun about whether or not mobile broadband would be enough to cover day to day needs. My answer based on three days of usage here is a resounding no with the caveat that it could certainly do in a pinch. But I do miss our 10 Mbit line at home right about now.

my two little babies

I’m really quite taken with the form factor as well. It’s so much smaller than I imagined – yet after having used it for a couple of hours the size seems just perfect. My Macbook know feels like it’s massive and very clumsy.

Performance-wise I’m also quite impressed. Granted I’m not using it for anything really taxing, but I see that as being the entire point with a machine this size. It’s great for doing online stuff, twittering, e-mail, facebook. As I read in a review it’s a machine for content consumption not so much for creation.

After receiving the machine I wiped the original XP home install that came with it and then installed XP professional. I don’t think there’s a massive difference, but I had a license lying around so I figured I might as well use that.

I also dabbled with dual-booting and now have a working OSX Leopard installation in separate partition. OSX works wonderfully on this little machine except for the built-in wireless card and the headphone and microphone ports. I’m getting a new wireless card and hope that someone much smarter than me figures out the sound issues. The MSIwind.net forums are awesome for getting help with anything related to this

But all in all. Beautiful little machine. Usable in a way the Eee never even came close to be.

Things to love:

• Awesome form factor
• Quite satisfactory build-quality
• Really good keyboard
• Bright screen
• Snappy performance
• Runs quite cool

Things to gripe about:

• The “, .- ‘ ¨^” keys are half sized compared to the others and that makes typing fast a problem
• Battery time is a joke – you’re pretty lucky if you can squeeze a little over two hours out of the 3-cell battery – if portability is in any way a point for you then make sure to get the 6-cell version
• The insane amount of little blinking LEDs. WTF were the designers of this thing thinking?

I’ll definitely be posting more about this little wonder as I start using it around more.

I did however also get an iPhone on ebay. I figured it was about time I took my geekhood a little more seriously. I was cheap and got the “old” iPhone. They’re cheap and abundant on ebay these days and it seems that with the 2.0 firmware update you’re really not missing out on that many killer features. If I don’t like it I can always sell it on without incurring major losses. They seem to be going for a bit more here in old DK than on ebay.

Here’s the coverage at engadget and to save you having to read through the coverage here’s a link to the turkish guy who got to fondle the unit.

The keyboard seems nice, the design is decent, but what’s with all the leds? Do we really need 8 (eight!) little lights just to insure that everything’s working properly. Sometimes less is really more, people.
Who makes a product release in Turkey anyway? WTF!

UPDATE: Turns out the MSI Wind is the Medion Akoya that was mentioned around the blogosphere recently umpc portal has the scoop.

Of course resolution factors in as well, but that’s a whole other post to be written right there.

I must admit the machine is looking beautiful and apart from the Via disaster and the less than stellar battery life I’m completely sold.

(picture from journey of a code monkey)

I just stumbled upon this promising site in the comments on engadget. One thing that impressed me when I was an Eee owner was the vibrant community at eeeuser.com. Here’s to hoping that mininoteuser can become just as awesome. When I signed up a couple of hours ago there was only 4 (four) members of the forum. Here’s to hoping that grows a little.

Here’s the link to the site

Naturally, everyone is looking to get in on the action and in the next couple of months we should be seeing not only Asus’ own updated Eee pc 900, but pretty much all the big actors are wanting a piece of the action. Dell and Acer have both announced that they’ll be releasing their own takes on the budget laptop concept this year.

Several lesser known (to me anyway) entities are also showing promising concepts. For instance the (perhaps mac-inspired) MSI Wind and the G10IL from ECS (which I always read as geil when I see it mentioned). There are a lot more UMPCportal has a nice list of the top ones (scroll down a bit – it’s on the right side).

The tendency is clear from the first iteration of the Eee. The screens are getting bigger and storage size is creeping upwards as well. Judging by my own experience with the Eee (that I blogged about here) this is a good thing. It’s a pain in the ass to fit your stuff into 4GB of storage and even though purists may see it as a fun exercise, I believe most people will se it as just a hassle that they’d rather be without.

HP released their take on the UMPC last week and it shows great promise (great review here). It’s beautiful, has a useable keyboard, has a bigger screen (8.9″), an awesome resolution, has bluetooth and ample storage built-in so you don’t have to resort to bizarre mods to get it doing what it should be doing out of the box.

Based on my reading on various forums it seems that there’s a front forming on whether or not this is an instance of “feature creeping” or if it’s bringing the product up to snuff. Everyone agrees on the crappiness of the Via C7 processor (hint: it’s about 10% slower than the underclocked Celeron in the Eee).

I like the way this is going. I think my personal sweet spot for buying another one of these after my Eee flop is something like the HP mini. Although I would like a 10″ screen and less Vista. That HP is so sweet it’s keeping me up at night though