Iron is a great alternative to Firefox Portable

I stumbled upon Iron when I was searching for an alternative for Firefox Portable. While Firefox portable is great to carry on a pen drive, it is excruciatingly slow because of its continuous flash drive access. Iron developers Srware also provide a portable edition of Iron, which in my experience is miles ahead of Firefox Portable in terms of speed.

The following comparison is taken from Srware website to show how Iron is different from Google Chrome in terms of privacy:

Some of the above are not some alarming issues, but still a little bit of additionally privacy is always better. Iron is highly recommended as a browser for a portable USB drive. You can also use Iron in case administrator rights issues do not allow you to install alternative web browsers at school or at work.

If you are on PC, you can use the MobiPocket Creator for converting your PDFs to Kindle format. Mac users can use an application called Stanza.

While the above two tools do a good job, they have one major drawback. They covert the documents with Header and Footer text intact, which means you will find lot of junk thrown all over your document. These headers and footers will appear in random places since the page size on a Kindle will differ from the page size of the PDF document (Typically A4 or Letter). This reduces the readability of the document dramatically.

The solution? Use Amazon’s conversion itself. It costs a little bit of money (at 10 cents per document), but it is really worth it since it does an intelligent conversion by stripping off headers/footers and also the images do appear in correct places unlike the desktop converters. You can also get the same service free by emailing the document to your kindle address with a ‘free’ prefix, in which case, the document is returned to your email address from where you have to copy to your Kindle 2 device manually. This email address is <yourkindleemail>@free.kindle.com.

If anyone knows a desktop converter (Mac or PC)  which can strip off headers and footers from office or PDF documents, please leave a comment below. Thanks!

Its not your primary computer

This is the most important thing to remember. A netbook with its puny processing power can never replace a fully powered desktop or laptop. You will feel this very often. If you are a college student, banish the thought of using the netbook as a primary computer. Keep an iMac at your dorm and then carry a netbook to class. The netbook excels if you are using it only for emails and web browsing. When you use it for anything other than this, it shows its shortcomings. Typical netbooks have a resolution of 1280×600 which is incompatible with many websites, so you will have a lot of trouble with webmail sites. Yahoo’s new interface is downright unusable and the gmail’s mail composer keeps jumping up and down. Text entry is associated with lot of vertical scrolling. Be prepared for this. On the other hand, Office 2007 works brilliantly even though the ribbon occupies a significant amount of screen real estate. If you are a Gmail user with a low resolution netbook, configure Gmail on Outlook or Thunderbird.

The sweet spot for a netbook screen size is 10”. Don’t buy anything less than that. Also check for the screen resolution. Many 10” netbooks still come with 1280×600 resolution – stay away from them. Make sure that it has atleast 1280×720 pixels. My dream netbook will have a 12” screen. (Hint: A best netbook to consider in this regard is the new Lenovo IdeaPad S12.)

Multimedia sucks

Plain and simple. Keep all the media files except perhaps your MP3 files away from the netbook. Don’t even think of HD on a netbook with Intel graphics.

But hold on a second. A big relief are the new batch of netbooks that are coming with NVIDIA Ion chipsets. They are capable of smooth 1080p HD playback and can play any type of media files with ease. You will have no regrets in the media department if you get a netbook with Ion. Most graphics work is offloaded to the GPU, so your Atom processor is free to do your main tasks.

The Keyboards are a Pain

Yes, this is another major pain area of the netbooks. It is not possible to incorporate a full size keyboard in netbooks because of obvious reasons, so don’t carry them to a typing competition. A 12” netbook can be a savior if you plan to churn out plenty of docs from your tiny laptop.

Battery Life Rocks

This is where netbooks excel. Though last year’s models are not known to be so good in terms of battery life, the new ones come with clever battery design which helps in incorporating a bigger battery and  correspondingly a much longer battery life – 7 hours is common on many new ultra portables.

Get one with at least a 6 cell battery and you will have juice for all day without searching for a power point.

Get Windows XP or Windows 7

I am sorry to say this – but please stay away from Linux on your netbook. You can dual boot with Linux if you need it, but don’t try to save that 50 dollars. You need Windows XP on your netbook. Period. (Hint: To save money, get a Linux laptop and then install Windows 7 RC on that. It just rocks and you can use it for a while before you need to get the final copy off the shelf. Stay away from Vista. It just doesn’t run so well on a netbook)

Nerds please excuse the above tip. I have a special post coming for you on the best Linux distros for netbooks. (Hint: A certain African distribution still rocks)

In summary

Get a netbook with:

• Resolution of 1280×720 or above
• 11 to 12 inch screen size
• NVIDIA Ion if you want good media capabilities
• 6 Cell battery or more
• Windows XP (or 7)

Get one which satisfies the above requirements and you should be happy for the next 2 years and 15 days.

When you enable the Turbo mode in Opera 10, it uses a proxy where all your browser requests are sent. The proxy downloads the web pages on your behalf, compresses them and sends it to your browser. Since the size of compressed data is much smaller, you get a better browsing speed. It also detects your current connection speed and increases or decreases the amount of compression accordingly. Some image quality is lost as the jpegs are re-encoded in order to reduce the size but then again it depends on your connection speed. Once you switch back to a faster connection, Opera reminds you to turn the Turbo mode off!

It appears like Opera are using the same proxy infrastructure that they are utilizing for the Opera Mini browser – which is very popular product on Java enabled handsets that do not have or have a poor quality web browser. Take Opera 10 for a spin – the other features apart from the “Turbo” are also worth having a good look at.

The first book I purchased is Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven – a wonderful travelogue on China! This is one book you should not miss if you like reading about China and its people.

The Palm Pre

This may open a gamut of third party official and unofficial applications trying to do the same for other devices. Apple may not like this and chose to shut down the third party ‘fake iPods’ from syncing with iTunes in a future version. The cat and mouse game will start and it will be fun watching devices losing support and then gaining again after every iTunes update!

Instead of shutting down these ‘fake iPods/iPhones’ Apple can also chose to licence iTunes with something in the line of “Works with iTunes” certification, which can dramatically increase the iTunes music sales.

PlaysForSure

Rumors are floating on the net about a new project from MS called the “Pink”. There are many speculations on what this Pink actually is  – while some say it is a “Zune Phone” there are also indications that it is simply the Zune services being made available on Windows Mobile. An MS tweet asking users to hold on their iPhone or Palm pre purchase till June is throwing open this speculation even more. If it is any sort of phone with a Microsoft branding on it, then it is nothing but a recipe for disaster.

Today, Microsoft’s huge market share in the smartphone business is because of the effoerts of its OEMs like HTC, Samsung and several network operators who have released several sleek and trendy devices. Building their own branded phone with a propreitary operating system based on the Zune platform is not the most pleasing thing that MS can do to its partners. They all have a equally powerful weapon with the Android platform and MS can see its market share dwindling if they switch to Android.

We hope that MS will not take such a drastic step and strain the relationship with OEMs – who are already not happy with the heavily outdated OS in Windows Mobile 6.1 and even the upcoming 6.5.

A netbook for Lenovo

There is little doubt that netbooks based on Intel Atom Processor have taken the PC World by storm. Their tiny size and decent functionality have made it quite popular among students and travelling professionals. Most of the basic computing needs like word processing, internet browsing, instant messaging, voip and media playback could be comfortably done on a netbook.

In the last few weeks or so, there is some hype surrounding Netbook 2.0 which are nothing but tiny laptops based on ARM processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon. Since ARM processors are designed to work on embedded devices and mobile phones, they consume very little power when compared to Intel x86 processors. This results in a much longer battery life than the current crop of netbooks. Snapdragon processor is now available at a frequency of 1GHz, which is a first for any processor using the ARM architecture. Because of the performance and long battery life, most technology sites are predicting that ARM based netbooks will take over the world and could pose a serious threat to CPU manufacturers like Intel and AMD on the netbook front.

Give me Windows please

While everything else seems right, there is a serious problem with ARM based netbooks. Currently, the only desktop OS that is available for ARM is Linux. While Linux is great for geeks, common man on the street still prefers Windows. I have been using Linux for several years and I am happy to see that the usability of Unix desktop environments like Gnome and KDE are growing by leaps and bounds. But the unforunate fact is that most people learn their computers with Windows and they grow up using Windows. Using Linux means switching to a new environment and a new set of applications like OpenOffice etc., Many start using these for a few days and then end up installing Windows.

Microsoft has not ported Windows to ARM and neither will they in the future. This means all ARM based netbooks will either run Linux or a tweaked version of Android OS. Considering that netbooks with Windows outsell those with Linux by a ratio of 9:1, it will be a tall order for “Netbooks 2.0″ to set the laptop market on fire. We can expect Intel or AMD based netbooks to rule the market for a long time to come.

HTC G1

As a confirmation, you can see that the recently redesigned Univercell.in website shows the G1 as “coming soon” for a price of 25k INR. So fasten your seat belts and get ready for some serious Android action.

Update: 26 Nov 2008: Hmmm, may be I spoke a little too soon. This report from The Economic Times says that the launch of HTC G1 is now postponed to a future date which is not decided.

In case you are wondering, even though the iPod Touch has closed some of the gaps with the Nokia N810, N810 is still the best portable computing device which also doubles up as a multimedia powerhouse. I have also updated the post which compares the performance between these two, along with the Sony Mylo.