Rick Mahn from The Mobile Lifestyle starts video blogging again, and talks briefly about direction of TML going forward.

(No, he wasn’t snoozing at the beginning.)

I’m going to keep this one short – real short.

I’ve been contemplating lately about mobility and the reality of our current selection of devices available.  I’m not going to say we don’t need them any more powerful, but I want to ask the question about why we even need things like Netbooks and iPads.

I’m not discounting their appeal, or their abilities – heck I have a netbook and I want an iPad.  I see how I can use them daily in many, many situations rather than a full blown laptop.

What I mean to point out is how much we all live in our smartphones.  I mean, we have mobile devices with broadband connectivity, 1GHz processors and near-HD displays.  We have hundreds of apps to solve any problem and web services tailored (mostly) for many other tasks.

The future is hear and it’ll only get better with two great competing platforms of Android and iPhone.

Photo courtesy of airgap

Let me preface this review with a disclaimer. I am not a geek. Nor am I a nerd, a techie, or a professional anything. I like my phones to make calls, and occasionally receive them (except when my mother is calling, but that’s another story.) I’m not fussy about connection, the concept of 3G and 4G and the bizarre conglomeration of letters and numbers that some companies use to describe their network – it all means nothing to me. So when my husband handed me the Verizon HTC Droid Incredible and said, “Here, play with this a little and tell me what you think” I rolled my eyes and sighed. Another gadget invading my happy home.

You see, I’ve traditionally been anti-Smartphone, almost to the point of belligerence. My (admittedly antiquated) notion was that a phone should be a phone, not a laptop or a PDA or any other overly-technical device. But after spending a day or two playing with the Incredible, I started to understand. When the little chirp alerted me to the arrival of a new email I had been waiting for, I began to appreciate the functionality. I was reading Tweets from friends while traveling down the freeway at speed (in the passenger seat, of course – never play with a Smartphone while driving, folks. Bad things can happen.)

I’m sure I’m preaching to an overly-technical choir here, though, and my Smartphone Epiphany is probably laughable to those of you who converted to the faith years ago. So I’ll get right down to the facts of the phone and let you snicker at my ignorance under your breath.

The Incredible isn’t the first Smartphone I’ve played with. My husband, being who he is, has paraded a plethora of devices under my nose in our years together. Android is another word for joy in this house, and because of him I’m no stranger to the various shapes and styles and features available in the market today. The Incredible, compared to the T-mobile G1 that was just retired from use this month (another story that I’ll get to in a bit) is a sexy little device, slender and supermodel gorgeous. It’s the Porsche Carrera GT to the G1’s Mustang. Both perform beautifully, but the G1 is just a little chunkier, a little meatier and not quite as racecar sleek. The Incredible streaks down the road while the G1 lumbers a bit.

The Incredible’s screen resolution and graphics are just as pretty as the outside, and while I’d love to delve into the technical specs of the device, I’ll leave that to the pros. I like the wallpapers. And the sound quality that comes from the tiny little speaker. It has a lot of features that I hadn’t really explored in-depth before. I love the pinch-zoom feature, which Rick calls “Multi Touch” – whatever, it’s handy and I like it. It scrolls smoothly and the little tiny knobby thing (I’m told this is called an Optical Joystick…ok, sure) is very responsive and sensitive. I tend to fat-finger everything I touch on a Smartphone, but I didn’t have any trouble adapting to the interface on the Incredible, which is – to risk having tomatoes thrown at me – incredible.

The Incredible isn’t all wine and roses, though. The biggest complaint, and this is a big one for someone as particular as I am, is “The Creak.” The case makes a strange little creaky-groaning noise when you hold it, and it can be a bit disruptive during a call when your phone sounds like you’re holding a demented bullfrog up to your ear. Now, I’m not sure how many hands were on this model before I got it, so it’s possible that the wear and tear of many folks putting it through its paces has taken its toll on the phone, but still, I’d expect a bit more sturdiness in a device of this caliber (and expense.) If it were my phone, I’d be disappointed.

The other issue that I have is with the volume buttons on the side of the phone. They are hypersensitive, and I have more than once accidentally either almost muted the call or deafened myself (especially in calls with the aforementioned mother…) so care needs to be taken not to hold the phone with your thumb on the buttons.

Other than that, I’ve been tickled pink with the performance. Battery life is outstanding – even where we live in the boonies, where signal is weak and the phone has to struggle to find it sometimes – the battery would consistently last well over a day, where the G1 and the Nexus One both require charging on a daily basis. And that brings me to the comparison that I’ve been building toward: How does the Incredible stack up against its sister phone, the Nexus One? Yes, we have one, and I had a few minutes to sit down and compare the devices side by side.

The Nexus One is a gorgeous little bundle of happy, and I was impressed enough with it when I finally saw it that I was half tempted to purchase one for myself. The Incredible carries the same sense of “whoa!” and while its body lines are slightly different, it’s difficult to pick one over the other regarding the overall sexiness of the phone. They perform equally magnificently, at least for a greenhorn like me, and aside from the battery life there are virtually no differences between the phones in performance. Both phones have done amazing things with the technology, and have gone a long way toward changing my view of Smartphones.

Ultimately, the decision between the Incredible and the Nexus come down to personal taste and, of course, provider. Would I drop our provider to get an Incredible? Probably not, since I’ve got access to the Nexus with ours. But if I had to choose which phone to buy and I had no network loyalties, it would be a very difficult decision indeed.

Signed,

A Reformed Smartphone-phobe.

Actually I picked up my first Acer Aspire One 751h at the end of June, so I’ve been living with one for over two weeks.  First you ask? Yep, I’m on my second unit, so what does that mean?

Let me get back to the beginning first.  I’ve been thinking about picking up a netbook for the last 18 months.  There have been several units through the various iterations from the original Asus EEE PCs, to the current crop of popular units from multiple vendors.

I happened to choose the 11.6 Acer Aspire One, which has the model number 751 here in the U.S.  There were several reasons for choosing this unit instead of the 10in. units that are available everywhere.  Key among them was the 1366×786 HD resolution and the full-size keyboard.  The fact that this unit shipped with 2GB of memory and a 250GB drive was only further inducement.

Now, those specs are pretty impressive for a netbook, even with the 3-cell battery included in this unit.  There are 6-cell versions out there too.  The downside for this model is the Intel Atom Z520 processor which clocks in at 1.33GHz.  It’s slightly underpowered in comparison to the N270 Atom chip (or so I’m lead to believe), even though it features hyper threading.

Even with the slower processor, the larger screen, higher resolution, and fullsize keyboard make up for the mediocre performance.  The key to that perspective also has to do with what I use the netbook for as well.  Since I no longer have need for high-power computing functionality like I used to, the system fits my needs quite nicely.  Heck, that’s what these things are for anyway, browsing, reading, writing, and more are the main functions anyway.

Interestingly, that Z520 chip is slightly underpowered for a reason, to squeeze more life out of limited power sources.  Such as the 3-cell battery included here.  I’ve not done any timed or load tests since I’m not into system testing, but rather I can give you some ideas on real-use battery life.  Simply, figure about 3hrs for normal use.  That’s including running either WiFi or a 3G USB modem.  Another nice thing in the power department is the super-small and lightweight AC adapter which, while not pocketable, is quite easy to pack along in smaller bags.

Overall, I’ve been quite pleased with the unit as a whole.  I’s less than 3lbs – 2.8lbs to be exact – and less than an inch thick.  There’s 3 USB ports, Ethernet, and VGA ports, and a switch for toggling WiFi quickly and easily.  Finally, the built-in webcam and memory card reader top off a pretty well rounded netbook.

So, what about that “first” one thing?  That was kinda strange, as it’s the first computer I’ve had that actually had an issue right out of the box.  At least a few hours from opening the box anyway.  Within about 3 days of light use it simply would power off after about 1 minute.  It literally would begin booting and then shutdown.  Even if I went into the BIOS, after about a minute or so, it’d shut down.  I think the first one was damaged or impaired in some way.

So, yes, I’m on the second unit, a nice pearl white one this time, and am quite happy with the swap.  The change from my 2 year old 15in. dual core monster is profound, and rewarding for the work I do.  As both a mobile professional and consultant, having a more portable solution with me everywhere is a huge improvement in productivity.

I thought I’d capture a few thoughts regarding my experience with the upgrade to the latest version of Firefox.  The short version is that everything went extremely well, better than the last point version upgrade. to 3.0

Of course, the 3.0 upgrade last year had significant architectural changes within the browser, akin to the major changes in Windows from XP to Vista.  Last year, I had significant issues with plugins and such as well – which is similar to the software compatibility issues folks had with Vista too.

This time, however, with version 3.5, there were very few issues.  The only one I could point to in fact, was Google Gears which needed an additional week before it was updated to work with 3.5.  Everything else just worked, and worked well.

So, yes, I’m still a committed Firefox user and plan to be for a long time.  The new enhancements & performance of the browser is fantastic.  It really helps to enhance the added portability of the new netbook I picked up two weeks ago as well.

But that’s another post.

Well I think I’ve finally found the best solution for synchronizing Outlook with Google Contacts and Google Calendar.  It’s CompanionLink, which has Outlook synchronization tools for a number of environments and scenarios.

No, this isn’t a paid post. I found CompanionLink for Google Android in my searches for a reliable sync tool for Outlook & Gmail, which was maid imperative with my purchase of the T-Mobile G1.

In previous attempts, I’ve used Thunderbird with various contact and calendar sync tools, but they just didn’t cut it.  They also were a manual process for the most part.

CompanionLink is a great tool that just sits and runs in your Windows tray and keeps your contacts, calendar, and tasks synchronized in the background.  Great stuff.