Part of MACH Würzburg team

Martin & Felix

Alex

Thanks everybody!

Apart of all the interesting work being done in our booth, I also explored the trade show and played with the new toys. I really loved Samsung’s projectors integrated on the cell phones. I can’t wait to develop something using Nokia’s QT libraries and publish it using the new Nokia store.

I attended the Mobile Awards, where lots of start ups introduced interesting projects and crazy ideas on elevator pitches (3 minutes maximum). Seems like not enough time, right? In fact 3 minutes is enough time to decide if the project and the guy introducing the startup will success or not. Some of them even started their careers as showmans. I love to attend this kind of start up events because you can feel a lot of creative energy.

You can feel the vibe and see where the industry is headed for the next years.

When Apple introduced the IPhone it was clear where the market was headed. The future of the mobile computing was in simpler, better engineered devices with usability in mind, not features. The IPhone was what the people really wanted. Today, the Iphone, one single device has a big piece of the market and the most interesting thing is that it has never been marketed as a business tool but a cool personal device.

My prediction was totally on it’s way. Nokia was sleeping and dying slowly. Until now. The most interesting pitch I attended on the last GSMA was given by a Nokia VP in which he was introducing the Nokia Store, explaining why they bought symbian just to offer it to public domain, why they also bought Trolltech for the QT technology and their vision of the future mobile computing.

All of that means a 180 degrees turn on Nokia’s strategy. They have a new paradigm and they now embraces a more open way of develop software for their devices. Nokia is full of bright people and they will probably be heading again the innovation in our industry in a couple of years.

This change has tough me that even big corporations are flexible enough to be able to adapt to changes on time. Something similar is happening on Microsoft. They have been a lot of years ignoring and looking down on Open Source initiatives. Now we are in the middle of an economic storm and they are losing market share and the corporation is changing fast to a friendlier approach to Linux and open source.

The world changes, and the companies that are not willing to adapt dissapear.

In my case its improving the way I work. Before having it, I used to carry my thinkpad everywhere with me. I really love this rock solid, super stable laptop, but has two problems. First, even being an ultraportable, it weights 1,4 kg which is too heavy if you are going to carry it always with you. The other problem is that I was using the x40 as my main laptop and I didn’t want to have the risk of losing it or (even worse) losing the data.

With the inexpensive laptop everything changes. It’s almost always with me in my bag because it’s a lot lighter and I use it wherever I have free time. Subways? No problem. As I don’t trust the laptop, I don’t carry sensible information there anymore (all my data is stored online anyway) so I’m less worried.

What kind of use does these small underpowered laptop have? I use mine mainly as a typewriter. I like to go to public areas like parks or crowded streets. Lots of ideas come to my mind while looking the people walking and running around me. These ideas are captured by my fingers and stored in the laptop.

It’s not perfect though. This laptop is cheap and unfortunately the keyboard is one of the places they Asus save money. The keyboard is bad if compared with Thinkpad’s family keyboards which personaly are the best laptop keyboards ever. It’s necessary to hit with energy each one of the keys to be sure that the keyboard is going to detect the letters correctly. Furthermore the keys are tiny, even for my small fingers. I frecuently hit keys I dont want.

That’s the price of convenience. Cheap underpowered laptop for online use and typewriting. Light. Almost disposable and without critical data stored.

Online use? Yes, another feature of the mini laptops is the webcam. These laptops are the perfect videoconferencing tool. The webcam and internal microphone allows you to have a pretty good video quality and decent audio quality without need of external microphones or headphones. And it’s light meaning you can easily move it around.

Three months ago was impossible to find small laptops in Korea but last week I went to Yongsan (Seoul electronic market, the biggest in Asia) and they had small laptops everywhere. Furthermore there have several options, including the new MSI wind which is by far a better deal than the Asus family, not only because the hardware (I don’t care about that anymore) but because the screen and the keyboard look a lot better.