In an interesting post over at GigaOM, Stacey Higginbotham notes that at the SXSW conference this year, there were far fewer notebooks on display and, correspondingly, a much larger number of people were using smartphones to stay connected.
This certainly tallies with my experience since owning an iPhone, in that I’m far more likely to only tote my phone and not bring my laptop if all I need to do is keep an eye on emails and a few feeds. While at a conference, especially, I’d far rather not be lugging around a notebook when I can keep up to date via email, Twitter and RSS on my phone. Having to carry it around all day is one thing, but also the point of a conference, for me, is to get out and connect with people, something that’s much harder to do if I’m stuck behind my notebook screen, tapping away.
Unfortunately, I can’t use my iPhone as a general-purpose mobile device for doing “real” work: the screen is too small and the keyboard is inadequate for large amounts of typing. So I’m not ready to drop my notebook altogether just yet. But in situations where all I need to do is stay up to date, answer a few emails or maybe catch up on a little reading (via the excellent Instapaper app for the iPhone), say while on a train journey or at a conference, it’s great to be free of having to lug my notebook everywhere — something that I couldn’t have imagined just a couple of short years ago. Maybe in a few years smartphones will have gotten so good that I won’t need to bring a notebook with me at all.
Have you noticed that better smartphones mean that you don’t need to carry your notebook with you as much?
Often my reviews here at WebWorkerDaily are peeks at beta or early release versions of an application or service. While I think it is useful to provide these sneak peeks, it is often in the first couple months of a product’s life when a lot of usability enhancements get put in to place.
So I decided to revisit a few of the applications I was impressed with in review, but hadn’t personally adopted, to see how they fare after a bit more cooking time. The first of these is Springpad, the online notebook organizer I last looked at back in November.
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Like many of us, I spend quite a lot of time on the web and come across a staggering number of interesting things. In Clearing The Cache I pull out some of my favorites and share them with you here.
Here are some of my favorite OneNote resources that I’ve flagged recently:
Microsoft Office Online tips us to a great demo of how to Take OneNote to class.
jkOnTheRun shares a great user contributed OneNote 2009 Day Planner. I’ve downloaded it and it’s very well done – Nice work David
7Breaths with a phenomenal GTD OneNote implementation (via Lifehacker)
OneNote Tips & Tricks on Outlining in OneNote
Don’t have OneNote but want to give it a try? Microsoft offers a free trial
And finally, I love our WWD readers. One discovered DropBox through our review and then goes on to use it for great things, like to share his OneNote notebooks on multiple machines. I’m now doing this as well and it works brilliantly.
Many of us who have embraced The Web as the place for our stuff have looked to applications like Backpack, Evernote, or Google Notebook as places to store all of the things that we need to get or stay organized.
While most apps of this type tend to be free form or even business focused, Springpad is a series of online notebooks designed to be a whole life organizational tool. Stay on top of not only your business or professional projects and items, but also track your personal life as well.
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When we asked whether you’d find a $899 MacBook tempting, a lot of you said “yes.” Alas, it turns out that the rumors of a seriously sub-$100 notebook from Apple were dead wrong. Steve Jobs did announce a $899 product at today’s press event – but it’s a new 24-inch display, not a laptop computer.
Jobs did announce a whole bunch of revisions to the MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro product lines, including one-piece aluminum shells, glass trackpads with multitouch, dual graphics chips, and bigger drives. Apple is reducing the entry-level price of the white plastic MacBook to $999 – but there’s a lot of psychological distance between that and the $800 price point that was getting kicked around in the blogs.
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In advance of tomorrow’s Apple media event, rumors are swirling about a sub-$1000 laptop – with most sources pegging it at an $800 or $900 price point. This would be a $200 to $300 drop from the current cheapest MacBook – but perhaps more importantly, it would also be the first time for an Apple laptop to break into a 3-digit price.
Of course, there are plenty of sub-$1000 laptops on the market already – you can buy Dell’s Inspiron line at prices from $499 up, and if you’re willing to compromise down to the “netbook” level of machine, with a 9-inch screen, you can find pricing under $400. But those cheaper machines are not, of course, Macs.
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For many web workers, the most expensive piece of gear is the laptop computer. For some of us, it’s even more than expensive: it’s essential, because it’s our only computer. But have you ever thought about how you’re protecting that investment? Here’s a rundown on the ways you can keep your laptop a bit safer.
Buy a Ruggedized Model. Some laptops are simply more resistant to physical damage than others. If you’re doing to do a great deal of travel, especially if you have a tendency towards klutziness, it’s worth looking into “ruggedized” or “semi-ruggedized” models. At the top of the sturdiness line you’ll find machines, like the Dell XFR D630, that comply with Department of Defense standards – they’re designed to be used in rough conditions and dropped without losing function. You’ll pay a premium if you go this route, though. At the very least, look for a computer (such as a MacBook) with an accelerometer built in to park the hard drive if you drop it.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
