Posts by SMPASS 9 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Apr 2011
I agree that not one of devices does it all. I'm waiting for something that can be peeled away as you need it. Like the pad phone where you have a phone that has the power, it drops into a tablet, then drops into a PC. All in one place, mixed with cloud storage. Who cares about which OS?
It is great to read a review that reflects my own in that you don't need to get carried away on which is best. I just buy what suits and is available at the time. I probably have more money than sense in that I use whatever device I have to hand. We have in our house, IPhone, Blackberry, kindles (2), IPads, (2), iPods (too many), desktops, laptops, DS, and I'm getting a nexus 7 for the kids. They all have their uses and they all get used at various points. The desktop is the one slowly getting left out. I only ever use it for photo shop these days.
I bought a Dell Mini 10v (1011) with 8gb SSD and immediately put the latest Ubuntu on. Currently on 11.10 and run Chromium OS from the SD slot. I think its the perfect machine. I could never understand why they dropped the SSD. It's perfect for sofa surfing and the battery lasts for 4 hours or so. As light as a tablet and it has a keyboard. I find the screen format fine.
It's a difficult time for hardware vendors, just how do you plan for the next 2 years? What I do know is not everyone is like me and wants to tinker with their machines. They just want something that gets them on line with a minimum of fuss. And so they should.
For Business, it's a bit more difficult, but there is one trend that's emerging and that it's attractive on so many levels to virtualise the desktop so that employees could in theory access the corporate image from anything. For business, running PC's for employees is an expensive distraction. If users bring their own kit in and access securely then everyone's a winner.
For consumers, someone looking after the health of their device is a minimum requirement. Why would my Grand Ma want to take an afternoon to clean up the registry. People will pay for this service.
Something 'like' the Chromebook model (though not the Chromebook) is the answer ultimately. You buy a device, log in and your away with all your previous work, photo's, etc . Drop the device down the toilet by accident, no problem, go to a vending machine, get another out, log on and your away. Need to access proprietary apps for work, log on to virtual desk top, multiple Vendor licences for work related applications, that's my employers problem.
So in summary, something with the format flexibility of the Asus Transformer, because you just need a keyboard, a removable touch screen as it's a great way to interact, and sub £200 so it isn't the end of the world when you lose it as all your data is elsewhere. Perfect, but not if you are a vendor as there is little margin. The OS? Who cares, so long as it lets me access a well managed applications market.
The only problem, is that although cloud devices and virtual desktop are here, the infrastructure isn't. WIFI is patchy and painful when out and about and 3G is not much better.
My problems are, I need the combination of;
- I have to use a Lenovo T410 with Win7 and Win apps as that's what my employer needs/wants
- At home I love my Netbook with Ubuntu and long battery life, it's fast, lightish and it just works
- I love my 7" Android capacitive screened device for messing about with and couch surfing
- I have to use a desktop XP/Linux desktop to cope with high end Photo processing
Before anyone thinks about Oracle technology on a virtual environment please take a look a metalink notes from Oracle such as 249212.1 regarding VMWare. Make sure you understand the difference between 'certified' and 'supported'. You should quite rightly be nervous about putting a 'production' instance on a non-certified configuration. If the support issue doesn't worry you, the way they licence their technology will, and it will tell you all you need to know about what Oracle thinks about customers using non-Oracle technology in the stack. In other words, they discourage you from using anything other than Oracle or Sun Hypervisors.
I've now upgraded an old Thinkpad T41 to 11.04 and it defaulted to 'classic' interface as it couldn't use 'Unity', this is a nice touch. I love the fact you can switch between 'Classic' and 'Unity' (on a machine that can run it) at the login screen. Perfect.
It all just works so I'm surprised people are having issues as I've installed it on 4 different machines now (2 upgrades and 2 fresh installs) and have had no issues whatsoever.
I have gone the upgrade route on a desktop to 11.04 and also a complete install on a Dell mini 10 and both were the simplest installs I have done since starting with Ubuntu 7. Admittedly there are differences but as I used 10.10 NBR I had already got used to unity. I think it is polished and well done. I'm surprised by the comments that it's not ready. Not ready for what? I have Mint on another machine and I like them both. The great thin about Linux is you can try as many as you like. If you think you can do better, then provide us with your own distro, I look forward to trying that too.
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