This Week at Mobile Tech Manor #49: On the Road Again

Mobile Tech Manor Large 2This week Mobile Tech Manor (MTM) grew wheels as the week was mostly spent on a road trip to Carmel, California. Trips like these are when it pays to be a mobile geek, as MTM can be anywhere in the world and still find me productive as usual. There are certainly worse places to go on a working trip than lovely Carmel. This week I got back to Vista and went Mac-less for the trip, with varying results. I got to hang out with a group of the brightest people in the tech world, and that made my time fly by far too quickly. Come on into MTM and I’ll share my week with you.

Road Trip

Carmel is one of the loveliest places on earth. The beach has the whitest, finest sand you’ll ever see and the rolling hills right up to the water are simply breathtaking. The quaint bungalows right at the beach look so inviting with the well tended lawns. It’s easy to forget what a cab driver told me, that Carmel is one of the most expensive places in California to live.

Every morning saw thick fog that routinely grounded all flights at the Monterey airport, probably why Kevin spent a grueling 24+ hours getting home to Philly. The fog burned off by 10 am each day I was there, and the days were brilliantly sunny and cloudless once the fog lifted. The Carmel area is just a wonderful place to visit, I hope to go back. I must admit I kept waiting for Clint Eastwood to ask me if I “felt lucky today, punk”, but I never saw him.

The purpose of this road trip was a GigaOM team offsite meeting, and it was great to see all of these bright people in one place. We had a couple of meetings this week (thanks GigaOM, for keeping these down to a minimum), and the energy of the bunch was a tangible thing wonderful to be a part of. It was interesting to see this big group of people so intimately involved in the tech world. There were laptops everywhere, and all were either Macs or ThinkPads. I don’t believe I saw any other brands of laptops in the group. There were Macs ranging from the plastic MacBooks to the big new 17-inch MacBook Pros. The ThinkPads were all of the very small variety, with the exception of the T400s I took with its 14-inch screen.

ThinkPad expensiveThe ThinkPad T400s served me well on the trip, and I didn’t regret bringing it. I appreciated how thin and light it was, the three pound weight was easy to handle. I also appreciated having the big screen, the 14-inch screen made working in multiple windows a breeze. I just checked the Lenovo web site to see how much these bad boys cost and found an amusing error, displayed to the right. Rest assured this price is not what you’d pay.

The only negative part of the experience about bringing the ThinkPad along for the ride was Windows  Vista. I know I’ll hear from the Windows crowd but Vista is a dog. I have been using the ThinkPad for over a month, duly keeping it updated and working smoothly. The day before the trip I manually went into Windows Update to make sure my trip wouldn’t be interrupted by an unexpected large update, something that always seems to happen. Windows Update found some small security updates and applied them nice and quickly.

I thought I was good to go in the update category but later that day I noticed the ThinkPad was running poorly, as if something big was happening in the background. This kind of thing is why I get so frustrated with Vista, this is not the first time this has happened to me. Sure enough, after a while Windows Update popped up and informed me that Vista Service Pack 2 had been downloaded and was ready to install. Say what?

I have Vista updated regularly. I duly applied each update that came my way. I had manually run Windows Update to make sure I was up-to-date. So why did Service Pack 2 not get applied at any time in the month past? Why did it not find SP2 during the dozens of updates over the weeks prior? This is a situation that so negatively impacts the mobile worker, and why I get continually frustrated by Windows Vista. It took almost 30 minutes to apply SP2, and during the whole process I was thinking about how big an impact this would have been had it happened during my trip. It shut me down for a good while and held up my preparation for the trip, which was bad enough.

I realize that Windows is a capable operating system, don’t think I don’t. When it runs smoothly it runs well and is a nice environment. There are no doubt technical things that Windows does better than Macs , I realize that. But for the mobile worker, Windows does not run as well over time as does a MacBook. There, I’ve said it. I noticed this during the meetings on this trip, with so many MacBooks and ThinkPads present. I watched carefully at the beginning of these meetings, as all of the attendees pulled out their laptops and got going. The MacBooks were all pulled out of bags, opened, and the user typing away in mere seconds. Every single one of them. This mirrors my own experience with my MacBook. Open it up and it’s going, connected to the web, almost immediately.

The ThinkPads on the other hand, my own included, were a different matter, as the users opened them up and then sat there for a bit. Waited for the notebook to resume from sleep. Waited for the web connection to happen. Waited for windows to open as programs started. It would have been comical if it hadn’t been so uniform, every single one of us on a Windows notebook went through this waiting game. While all the MacBook users got down to business. Call me a fanboy if you must, but mobile work does not have to be this way.

OK, I’ll calm down now. Sorry for the rant, but it’s a recurring theme. I use both OSes constantly in the work I do, given all the different notebooks I evaluate. It’s not a fluke, it’s not a given device, it’s consistent across the platforms and I feel better having gotten that off my chest. I can state from my own experience, when it comes to the mobile experience, the Mac is better than Windows, hands down.

Working on the ThinkPad during the trip made me realize something interesting about the software I used. On the Mac, Firefox is my browser of choice. It runs lightning fast, and is as fast (or faster) as the Google Chrome browser. It is the program I have running all day every day, and I love it. On the ThinkPad, however, it was a different experience.

I found that Firefox could get bogged down from time to time, and it would slow down to the point I would get annoyed. I found that to be especially true when using Google Reader, something I do off and on all day. It was so bad that I fired up Chrome and the difference was like night and day. Chrome was faster in every way than Firefox under Vista. It ran so much faster than Firefox that I switched to it for the entire trip, something I would never have thought I’d do. I only have two or three add-ons in Firefox so that wasn’t the reason for the slow-down, Chrome is just significantly faster than Firefox running under Windows. Google has improved Chrome so that it was perfectly stable, too, which was not the case when it was first released. I had no issues running Chrome.

Palm Pre is cool

Every time the GigaOM team got together one or two people would ask to see the Palm Pre. No matter what you think about the Pre it has buzz factor, and even these tech-savvy folks at the meeting were excited to see it. One of these folks, who shall remain nameless, played with the Pre for a good while at dinner one night. It was funny watching him swooping and swiping apps around on the Pre, and the excited look on his face was priceless.

He was a BlackBerry user, and he kept commenting how easy the Pre was to use. Finally, after playing with it a while, he asked me if I thought the Pre was better than the BlackBerry. I gave my standard “that depends on your particular needs” speech, after which he mentioned that the BlackBerry was the “best phone he’s ever used”.

I looked at him for a moment and then told him that I never, ever recommended that someone replace “the best phone I’ve ever used” with anything else. You risk giving up a great known for something that probably won’t live up to expectations. He then responded “but the Pre is so cool!”. I laughed at that, and pointed out that he didn’t ask me which phone was “cooler”, he asked which was “better”. It’s a typical reaction to the Pre though, it is seen as cool by just about everyone who tries it.

E-book of the week

The book I have been reading this week is the continuation in the Jason Bourne story begun by Robert Ludlum. The Bourne Deception, while promoted as “Robert Ludlum’s”, is in fact written by Eric van Lustbader. I find this a bit deceptive, as it’s not easy to tell off the bat that it’s not written by the great Ludlum. But the story is a decent one, picking up the story of Jason Bourne in Bali, and quickly moving all around the globe. It’s fast paced, and Bourne is in as much trouble as he always finds himself getting into, and it’s a good read.

Wrap-up, back home again

That’s pretty much the way my week went down in Mobile Tech Manor, although the Manor was on the road again. Sorry for the ranting about Vista, but hey, it deserves it as far as I’m concerned. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back soon to share my week with you once again.

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