As a mobile worker around Europe, I have to struggle with the most cost effective way of having data access for both smartphone and laptop wherever I am. This mostly consists of finding free or low cost WiFi at whatever accommodation or working location I am in, or negotiating the local pre-paid/pay as you go market for mobile broadband. The big challenge for more mobile data working is the cost of mobile data itself, which is still mostly charged in MB chunks such as £1.50 to £3 per MB. This is pretty much extortion when you see that non-roaming data can be between £2 and £4 per day with acceptable use policies applying, and the average web page or email today can be greater than 1MB in size.

So it is good news that the EU has moved to limit the amount of money you can accidentally spend on mobile broadband so you do not end up with the £2000 bill for a little bit of surfing, but personally I believe that they should be spending their efforts investigating the true cost of providing roaming data and limiting the mobile companies profits in this area, or at least educating them that encouraging data use is a good thing for them to sell more services.

What do you think?

Mobile Broadband Affordability for the Traveller is a post from: Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

Makes you wonder why SMS is even used any more considering how many people have mobile email!

Hopefully the number of people out there using these devices whilst travelling may actually encourage the mobile operators to reduce data roaming costs… maybe.

Everyone Mobile is a post from: Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

To me it is simple, it just another device in the realm that has not got one name, inhabited by the continuum of webpad, smartbook, netbook and laptops. However where does it fit in? To cut the discussion short it is, as a device running a restricted unitasking OS, most definitely fitting into the cutdown low end area of webpads. This is despite the high price.

So does the mobile worker use a webpad? Not at all, unless it is there as part of a vertical market application need. As this therefore there is no interest here, and we can all move along. For the home, there can be a different argument I am sure.

But I hear you say, what about smartbooks and netbooks? What use are these to the mobile worker? They can be just as simple and not suitable for business mobile use? Well that may have been true once with the early EeePC 701, and is true of smartbooks in my opinion, but the modern netbook has evolved. It has evolved into ultra compact laptops as they had of old but without the high end price. More on that in a future post.

iPad, NetPad, Smartbook, Netbook, Laptop, whatever is a post from: Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

Well this week I moved one of my netbooks over to Windows 7 which because it had XP meant that it was a clean install. Of course, as part of the installation I set up Microsoft Mesh and selected the normal folders to pull down onto the machine. Well three days later, the sync had not finished and was looking like it was stalled. A quick check through the logs showed an error WinError 18, with the associated text missing file. Checking around I found that the Live Desktop was at 5GB used (which it was not before) and this immediately sprang an idea in my head. Mesh is pretty dumb at times.

It has always been the case that you could setup sync and exceed your online storage and just ignore it. In fact, Paul Thurrott blogged about it in the early days but what was missed was the effect of exceeding your storage, something that I only saw when I also checked my Broadband data usage through my ISP’s nice dashboard. When the online storage is full, Mesh continues to attempt to sync and in this approach it uses bandwidth over and over again so it creates network traffic needlessly. This is a bit poor, particularly when this also seems to hit the processor usage of the machines involved.

Removing the online data store usage of Live stopped the whole repeated sync and suddenly everything is happy again. The world is good, and I am no longer frustrated with the never ending sync.

So come on Microsoft, fix Mesh and give it better behaviour when online storage is exceeded. Additionally, why do you keep it at 5GB? What is wrong with integrating this with the 25GB Live Skydrive?

Meshing around is a post from: Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

At the same time, many people rule out netbooks as low power, sluggish computers that cannot replace a main machine. After my experience of the last month and a half, I would agree. This is when I purchased a new netbook after a problem occurred with my first one … the venerable Advent 4211C, an MSI Wind U100 rebrand. Amazing how I can call a computer that is less than 15 months old as venerable!

The netbook I purchased was the Asus EeePC 1008HA, a very nice and thin machine which I did not originally desire, but my options were limited. The machine I wanted was the Asus EeePC 1005HA but that was not in stock in the timeframe I needed. The problem with the 1008HA is the shorter battery life and the higher price, but I was desperate that evening for a machine. The other problem is that it came with 1GB of RAM compared to my upgraded Advent machine that had 2GB.

The other problem I quickly discovered was that it is closed up harder than a coconut. The machine is basically not upgradeable by anyone but the brave. Needless to say I proved braver than most, particularly after I managed to pierce the keyboard ribbon connector and cut two wires whilst trying to get at the memory. This is because you have to crack the case open after removing the keyboard, disconnecting multiple connectors and making sure that you use the dip switch to disable the battery feed to the machine (thus avoiding blowing the whole thing).  Who needs the left CTRL, Alt, Windows, Fn, function, delete and backspace keys anyway!  After all the fun with doing that I found I had the wrong 2GB memory stick. Putting my slightly crippled machine back together, I had to focus on my day job and with it using the still 1GB Asus.

What I noticed quite quickly is that the machine perpetually struggled with the lack of RAM at a scale that virtual memory could not help. The machine has had a minimum physical memory used of between 700MB and 930MB, and I now know what happens when the physical memory starts to run out… a machine that goes into coma for 30 seconds plus as it struggles to unload a program, to load another one. This has not been a good experience. If this was all the experience I had ever had with a netbook, I could understand saying that netbooks are useless.

Let us be honest, the sweet spot for Windows XP is 2GB ( just like the sweet spot for Vista I have found is 3GB ). This means that all netbooks are not as performant as they could be, and it will stay this way as long as manufacturers keep with supplying them with 1GB. I have started to see however netbooks and their like coming through with 2GB and this seems to be tied to supplying the machine with Windows 7… At least, Windows 7 Home Premium. I hope this continues.

So my best advice out there for the netbook owner? Get yourself upgraded to 2GB… you will then have a very functional, low cost, very portable machine that will perform every duty you throw at it except really heavy duty graphics/video or gaming. The other advice? Make sure that your netbook is user upgradeable. Me? I now have the machine I need but no warranty.

Netbooks and Performance is a post from: Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

Then I accidentally left the WiFi on after leaving one office with WiFi and went to another office without WiFi. I did not really notice but suddenly my phone was back to and exceeded my previous battery life. WTF! Further tests with both my iPhones (yes I have two, one for each country) concluded further that this is a real affect and is not proven explainable although I have a theory that I would love checking. Technically turning WiFi should cause a REDUCTION in battery life.

The theory that I have is that Apple have boosted the transmission power on the iPhone 3G radio to allow it to better operate on the US ATT network which is notoriously poor in many US states. This causes the battery to drain further, and also explains why it was not ‘fixed’ in the 3.1.2 release – as it is not something they want to fix as it is solving a US issue that they are getting a lot of flack for. However, the moment you turn the WiFi on I believe that drops the 3G transmission power back to previous levels, which when WiFi is only beacon’ing (trying to find another WiFi network) means a reduced power draw and better battery life. The other evidence is that I note that the iPhones are noticeably warmer when only on 3G.

Not sure if this is really true, but all I know is that my phones now last a lot longer. Try it, it can only improve things.

iPhone Battery Life… improvements is a post from: Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

This is where I come to my latest favourite, the Freecom XXS 320GB. This is a tiny 2.5” device that is as simple as simple can be. It is essentially a rubber cased bare harddrive with an attached USB2 Interface. It has a good low cost/size of storage ratio (less than €100 for 320GB) and is speedy enough, and the cost aspect is very important. This is because when travelling, the failure rate for HDs is very high even when they are supposed to be robust. This unit is replaceable… an effective property. The rubber casing makes it reasonably robust still though, so I do not expect this to fail too quickly, and this so easily gets dropped into my flight bag. The other thing is, the sleek black rubber just looks cool. You really do want something like this when you are away from home, particularly for taking that extra addition of media for long evenings stuck in hotel rooms with CNN for company.

Portable Storage on the Road is a post from: Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The big blocker here is that generally your electronics have to be off from the time you enter the departure gate and move to the plane, through to that magic ‘SeatBelts’ light goes out. Then it has to be off from the beginning of the landing procedure to the time you are into the arrival gate. This is by far the longest time of the flight.

This is even true of the slightly longer flight, not quite a real benefit to the commuter traveller. In fact the real benefit is about NOT having technology.

One thing though, the real saver is the smartphone which does not have the start up and shutdown time… for the snatched email and web browse on the ground, but then WiFi is not required for that.

WiFi on Aircraft is a post from: Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

So the decision was taken to replace the machine with something that could work particularly since I was four nights/five days from base. So given machine obtained (an Asus EeePC 1008HA), the recovery mechanism started.

What can I say about the experience? It took way longer than I hoped… in fact to basic usage of the machine it took the whole evening (expected) and to fully complete four days. Why did it take so long? Well the big time killer was synchronisation of files using Live Mesh – it just took a long time because I have a lot of data to put on the machine. Even then, this was sped up by the use of the non-dead machine I was replacing being local to the laptop for much of the recovery time, so this is not an issue of upstream performance on the small business ADSL. The one main thing though about the recovery mechanism was that it did work and got me working on the road. How about your on the road recovery mechanism? You really do need one for when you are on the road.

Note: My recovery steps

1. Base install of OS and configuration for basic networking including Anti-Virus (including machine hardening steps that I always follow)

2. Install key applications – Live tools, Live Mesh, Evernote, VPN client, Firefox, Firefox addins such as delicious and Xmarks to ensure I have my bookmarks and saved passwords, RocketDock, Skype, Skype handset drivers, Spambayes, WinSCP, Adobe Air, Tweetdeck (using group sync so I have all my groups) and Syncback.

3. Install MS Office 2007 and Project 2007 using online downloads of Trial software (hey I do not carry the disks, no need to when you can get the Trial versions that work up to 60 days).

4. Configure Outlook 2007 for my multiple Exchange hosted mail and IMAP4 accounts.

5. Install key driver software for 3G card etc.

6. Setup Live tools such as Live Messenger and Live Sync as necessary (I use Live Sync for My Pictures rather than Live Mesh just because it is setup in a better way for those file types).

7. Sync core file folders that are in Live Mesh

8. Sync secondary file folders in Live Mesh

9. Install iTunes and move my iPhone over and setting up Podcasts that I listen to on it (Music waited until it had completed synchronisation as I use Live Mesh that my MP3s are on all my machines).

10. Install Truecrypt for whole disk encryption, although activating this is outside of the four days

11. When back at base, reinstall MS Office 2007 and Project 2007 using my actual media and proper activation keys (needed because the trial versions do not activate with my keys probably because my keys come from a volume licensing deal).

On the road failure is a post from: Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

More on that another time, but I would like to return to the ‘secondary’ device comment. Walking around, the iPhone is a great emailer and mobile work business helper but it simply cannot replace a PC for working email and documents. You do need a PC to get the job done, and netbooks are really a good package for that, particularly when you have a large screen and keyboard installation in your semi-permanent working locations.  Working with the MSI Wind though has really punched my buttons with regard to battery life – my MSI Wind is simply too short lived at 4 hours, although good for many I am now looking at the latest batch of machines that give 8+ hours. However I am torn between waiting for Windows 7 based machines or getting an XP based machine now. I will have to see how long I can tough that one out. You can sense an update coming…

How about your experiences with iPhone? Netbook? Recommendations for a long life battery netbook? Feel free to comment.

Travelling … service resuming is a post from: Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech