Geoffrey Meredith

My recent trip Banff gave me a lot to think about in terms of the kinds of tools that would make me productive in mobile environments.

There really are two different environments that I am thinking.  The first is relates to being able to do a limited amount of work while I'm out and about but need to be able to react quickly to problems.  The second is one that would travel with me to places where I want to get serious work done.

Light Computing

My "out and about" mobile client needs to be light enough to fit in a big pocket of my cargo pants and powerful enough to write medium length email messages and visit standard web pages.  I've played with a few things.  I've uses a Nokia 770 Internet tablet, a Samsung A920, a Razr, an eee PC and even an OLPC XO.  The WiFi devices are pretty good where you can get open WiFi but that's not an easy thing to do in Vancouver.  There is a lot of WiFi signal around but people have gotten smart about locking them down.  Until/if Vancouver gets blanket WiFi or WiMax, the only real solution is cellular data.  I tried to pairing up the N770 with the A920 via bluetooth and use the DUN.  That worked fairly well until the $100 bill came in for a couple of dozen web pages.  Cellular data plans are hideously expensive here in Canada.  So far, my best option ends up being a lowly Razr on a prepaid plan from VirginMobile.ca.  I don't use it much for talking but for $7/month I unlimited web browsing, albeit on an extremely limited device.  At least I can check my Gmail account regularly and either respond if it's no more than a sentence, or get myself to a real computer quickly.

This is not a great solution but it will have to do until I can find something better.  An iPhone would get me fairly close but even if it were available in Canada, I'd still have a hard time justifying it's cost.  I'm just not that mobile that I could justify it.  Unless I could find a project that I required it!  Even then, I would like to have a better keyboard.  I like the idea of the folding bluetooth keyboards.  You can just pull them out when you need to do more extensive typing.  I have a borrowed one but I've yet to find a bluetooth device that it will work with.  That seems to be a common problem with these things.

Heavy Computing

When I'm going to camp out in some hotel room for a bit and need to do serious work while I'm there, I can get by with some standard equipment but I have been dreaming about the ideal set up.  Most of this equipment does not exist and I doubt it ever will.  It's not a matter of can it be built but is there a market for it and a manufacturer willing to risking building it.

Instead of having a standard notebook computer, this would be made up of a couple of components that would be built using similar technologies to notebooks.  The core would be the CPU and storage module.  This would be something along the lines of a mac mini in size although I'm not sure that the optical drive would be necessary.  Not for me anyway.  Just a hard drive and a decent CPU.  Maybe a battery.  Some IO ports.  WiFi, WiMax or cellular data or a PCI express slot to provide for connectivity.  I could see selecting this component from a number similar units that could be configured for high power or portability, etc, just like notebook computers are today.  For display, we could have our choice too.  A very think and light clamshell that was made up of a keyboard, touch pad and screen that had wireless connectivity to the CPU base up to folding dual 17" panels with stand and wired DVI connection to the base.  A separate wireless keyboard and touch pad or mouse would be designed for travel but could be chosen to suit the user.  Many would be fine with a notebook style keyboard and touch pad but I'd prefer a split keyboard and full size mouse.

All of these components could fit into a reasonably small case and not be too heavy.  Likely in the 10 pound range.  Now that sounds heavy to those that wander around all day with a 3 pound notebook over the shoulder all day but that's not what this is for.  This form factor would be very nice as a desktop replacement but would also be compact enough to travel although note necessarily fit on your airline seat back tray.

Most of the interface standards already exist.  Bluetooth would work for a lot of the wireless communicatiosn between compoents.  The screen connection might need some redesign, especially if it were wireless.  Most of these components just require the tallents of a good notebook packaging designer and engineer.  When you look at what Apple did with the Air, could you imagine that same skill applied to these component system?

What's kind of funny about some of these ideas is that I've had some of this in the past.  15 to 20 years ago, I had a series of "portable" computers that weighted from 20 to 35 pounds.  From the Osborne to the original Compaq, the metal cased Eagle and even IBM's first (and I think only) lunchbox style computer, I had computers that were fairly close in functionality to the then available desktop computers.  I actually took most of these on airplanes (although the Compaq had to have it's boards and connectors reseated after each trip!)

So I would love to have some of the expertise that is used to make today's laptops put into portable component computing.  To have a set of mix and match parts that I could use to build my ideal portable working environment would be wonderful.

I doubt that I will see this though.  The computer industry is too focused on building slight variations on a couple of themes.  You can see how reluctant manufactures are to step out side of a narrow box when you look at the success of the eee PC.  Millions of these have been sold into a market that did not exist before it was produced.  There was obviously a demand but the manufacturers were not willing to risk it until Asus came a long.  Hmm... maybe Asus will start building my mobile modular computer components (the MMCC?).

I can always dream!

I've always found that my productivity really suffers when I need to go mobile.  I have to squeeze a subset of my office desktop's functionality onto a notebook computer.  The time and effort required to get setup and low productivity environment that I end up with would generally make it not worth the effort.  Well, I just came back from a 9 day stay at The Banff Center so before I left, I was determined to experiment on how I productive I could become in such an environment.  The Banff Center is an academic and conference center that has a world class reputation for media, arts and management events.  I was told that they had a great computing resources so I thought that this would be a best case test.

Once set up in our room, I tested out the WiFi.  The signal was better than in my office!  I continued to set up the 5 computers that I brought.  A 14" Dell notebook, a MacBook, an eee PC, an OLPC XO and a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.  The Dell was to be my main workstation and I brought my office mouse and MS Natural Keyboard to give me a feeling that was as much like the office as possible.  The MacBook and eee PC are my wife's computing devices so they were not an important part of the experiment.  The XO worked well as an email station for around the campus and the N770 was easy to carry around Banff.  With the large number of hotels/motels and coffee shops, it's wasn't too hard to find WiFi in town.

To add an additional screen to the mix, I uses a S-Video cable to create a secondary desktop from the Dell on the room's TV.  The quality wasn't great but worked well for Twhirl Twitter client and for playing movies at other times.

At the workshop that my wife was attending, she won a Tangent WiFi Table Radio so we ended up with 6 WiFi devices in the room at times.  They all worked really well.  The one problem that I did have is they seemed to be capping the bandwidth of any individual WiFi device to about 100Kbps.  It was low latency so it was fast enough for using VNC, SSH and general web surfing but made downloading my daily podcasts a pain.

Bringing my comfortable mouse and keyboard really helped.  I use a natural keyboard because of it's split layout.  It has really helps keeping chronic carpel tunnel syndrome at bay but it makes the transition to the cramped space of a notebook keyboard a real pain (literally).  I think that I almost prefer the little rubber keys on the XO to the notebook keyboard because I don't even try to touch type but switch to a 4 fingered hunt and peck.

The two things that I did miss from my desktop environment is the 4 screen setup using a 22" and 19" monitors on my desktop, and controlling the Dell using Input Director from the desktop and the little XO sitting above my monitors scrolling logging information.  The second things is text size.  The text on the 22" seemed monstrous when I got home.  It felt like you do after getting off of a long flight sitting in a middle seat.

Another problem that developed relates to a particular ergonomic requirement that I have.  In my office, my keyboard sits about a foot in from the edge of a corner disk.  I can then put my elbows on the desk.  I find this to be extremely comfortable and I can spend long sessions typing without fatigue.  The room at The Banff Center was very well equiped but it did only have the standard 24" deep desk.  The notebook with only the natural keyboard in front of it left only a couple of inches of desk to rest my arms on.  Not nearly enough for me and I ended up with very sore arms.

Because most of my work involves websites and the internet in general, I often working on remote servers vis SSH so working from Banff was not much of a hindrance.  A VNC connection to my office desktop and other office machines were pretty effective.  I found I could get light coding done remotely with no problem.  I've moved most of my productivity apps to the cloud (GMail/GDocs, SlimTimer.com, RememberTheMilk.com, Twitter, etc) so as long as the connectivity is good, those are no problem.

All in all, I think that I came pretty close to a good mobile setup.  It was fairly productive but I don't think that I ever really got into the "groove".  There are reasons for this that go beyond the nature of my setup (maybe the beautify mountains!)

I did have some thought about the dream mobile office setup would be but I'll leave that to another post.