Netbooks/Cloud Computing Services for Information Management?

Posted by Ken
Dec 15, 2008 at 05:58 AM

Hi Jan (if you are back from your trip with your new netbook) or anybody else who wishes to comment,

I was wondering your initial thoughts/impression on your new NC10 netbook. I keep trying to decide what hardware combination (from desktop all the way down to PDA ,or its modern-day replacement - the WiFi tablet) will best help me meet my organizational needs. It seems that the more I think about it, the more complicated it gets. I never really considered some of the “cloud” or the synching services, like Dropbox, as a part of my PIM+ strategy, but maybe I was “thinking inside the box”. Ideally, I would like software that could reside with my files on the device in hand, but easily synch through the web, like what Dropbox seems to offer. This way I would not be tied to the web, but could take advantage of it if I was without that dedicated piece of hardware. Am I better, and more importantly, reliably served by not relying on the web? Win XP on a netbook is a pretty known quantity. Certainly I could not run a program like Surfulator from a tablet, but am I willing to give a netbook a permanent home in my briefcase rather than my old, but small, Sony PDA? Any advice would be greatly appreciated, as I feel that I have dug myself into an information management rut. And we all know that the only difference between a rut and a grave is depth!

—Ken