JonCamfieldBlog: Portability vs The World

If you want portability; you really have to accept some tradeoffs -- mainly, a big screen and ridiculous storage space. If those are no-gos, then you're stuck with a sore shoulder for the rest of your laptop-lugging days, or at least until there's a new development in screen technology involving origami, better OLED projectors, or a high-res viewscreen built into goggles for a large, virtual screen.

I've been using my "G1G1" OLPC XO (http://aptop.org) as my travel machine. It does RDP and VNC (and ssh, natch) if I need to connect remotely to a machine, has basic browsing (and Opera works just fine on it with a little effort), document editing, and so on. It can deal with Google Apps (for spreadsheets) and is super tiny, weighs about as much as a full coffee mug, rugged, and I can read the screen in full sunlight. Bonus: it can charge from those annoying cellphone-only charging stations and a full battery lasts 4-5 hours (wireless turned off) which is perfect for watching a movie or two^H^H^H^H^H^H getting work done on a long plane flight. It's not a powerful processor and has only 1G onboard storage (with an SD slot; I have an additional 4G on that), a few USB drives, and nothing else. You'd be surprised how functional that can be as long as you remember to copy whatever you want to work on to a thumbdrive before heading out the door. If not, it has some of the best wifi reception I've ever seen, and the first round of G1G1 systems came with a year of free Starbucks/tMobile wifi, which most airports have somewhere. If you're willing to accept the limitations of the system, it's hard to beat as a travel system. There's rumors of another round of G1G1 coming soon. If anyone is curious about the XO, there are monthly XO meetups (posted at olpclearningclub.org) and other news and events posted at OLPCNews.com (Note: I write for OLPCNews)

Finally, is there a good TCO study on a mac laptop vs. a hardware-similar PC laptop that includes security software, general hassles, and so on? Having recently blown a few weekends working with bluescreen-level driver problems on my boss's brand new Vista machine, I have newfound respect for a system that Just Works.