Right now I am a senior in college and have had a fair amount of experience with technology in various settings. I started my freshman year like most kids, undecided major and a "kickass" laptop! It was a dell latitude running windows XP, I don't remember much of the specs other than it was slower than syrup on fly paper when I tried to multi-task. I didn't need it for much, mostly just paper writing and powerpoint making, but every college kid wants to have gigs of music, lots of videos, games, etc. Soon I decided that my laptop would no longer due ( I did get a blue screen of death during finals week and lost some very valuable material) so I up graded to a sony Vaio running Vista. I HATED vista but loved the computer. It could do everything I needed it to do!! It never slowed down or gave me any guff (unless I wanted to launch a program that needed to be right clicked then "run as admin" lol). The only problem? It weighed a ton and sucked to carry around everywhere. I started using it more as a desktop than a laptop which got me to thinking, do I really need a laptop? The answer was YES even though there were computers on campus I could use if I was caught in a pinch. The reason a desktop could not be my only computing device was that the boot times on the campus computers were over 7 minutes and once in the desktop environment it ran super sluggish. Also, if I was working on a group project, there could be no vocal communication around a public computer because they were in "quiet" work zones. If I traveled to another person's house and had something digital I wanted to show them I sure as hell wasn't going to bring my desktop and I often lose flash drives so the laptop had to stay. Late into my sophomore year I started using linux on my laptop and other open source technology (I will do a separate more in-depth post on this later) and found that I enjoyed that environment more than Windows. After dabbling in linux for a spell, I heard of these tiny laptops that ran linux called "netbooks". I did some research on them and decided that I needed one to solve my portability issues. I purchased a Asus 1005HA Eee PC off craig's list for fairly cheap ($200-250 I think) and was super excited.
This is the little guy right here!
It came loaded up with XP and tons of bloat software but I blasted that all away within a week and loaded it up with Ubuntu 10.04. (really the timeline of events went like this; Jolicloud, Ubuntu, Netbook remix, Ubuntu, Mint, then finally settled on a dual boot with Ubuntu and Mint) The netbook is the perfect solution for every college student. It can do everything a laptop can do but weighs way less! Plus all the girls ask questions about it because "its sooooo cute :P". I will admit that when I first purchased it I was very worried about not having a disk drive. I went out and bought an external for $40 I think and carried it around with me. After about a week or two I stopped carrying the disk drive. After another month I regretted buying it because I never used physical media anymore! All of the class material was online, my music I downloaded, games were all digital and any files I couldn't get I just had people put on flash drives for me. I loved the freedom!
I now had one laptop and one netbook........something had to go. There were times when I wished I had a little more power out of the little guy but I hated using my laptop as a "desktop" when I needed that power. I sold my laptop and bought a physical desktop to keep at home to do serious computing and carried my netbook with me to school. It was a match made in heaven!!! I could start writing papers at school and then email or dropbox (more to come about this FANTASTIC software later) them to myself so that I could work on them with the desktop and big monitor screen. My netbook became all business and the desktop became business/pleasure. I did all my gaming and videos on the desktop and had some music on the netbook with maybe a few low key games. The crucial thing was being able to work on the netbook at school and then come home to the big screen if I didn't finish.
I love technology and am constantly looking to advance and soon enough I started looking for the "new" netbook. Tablets were just starting to take off about this time. Ipad was on everyone's radar but it didn't have a market niche excepted for rich people who wanted a cool way to check their email. I HATED it. People were saying it was going to be great for schools because you could read and write on it!.......Write? Sure you could "write" on it but it wasn't graceful or refined and as for reading? FORGET IT. If you are like many students who constantly look at computer screens, you start to get fatigued after awhile. I could not imagine having to look at an Ipad all day at school and then come home to stare at it for another couple hours trying to read assignments. As far as I am concerned, e-ink is the only method for digital, long term reading that anyone should use. (Again another topic I will cover in detail) So needless to say I wasn't sold on the whole tablet idea.......yet. Time passed and I was happy with my netbook/desktop arrangement but tech news would not leave the tablet alone. Advances were being made both with hardware and software and I could no longer avoid the topic. I wanted something that could be portable and practical in a school setting, so what good would a portable monitor be without a keyboard? There was no way I was going to return to the days of hunting and pecking to type papers, I needed a keyboard!! Then Asus, they guys that made my awesome netbook, had a brilliant idea. "Why not make a high bred tablet/netbook?", Asus asked. Enter the TRANSFORMER!!!
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| Asus Transformer. Pic via google search |
As soon as I saw this I thought, "Yes! This is what I need! This is the future of netbooks! The kind of cool feature of a tablet and the functionality of a full size keyboard!!". The Transformer ran Android Honeycomb 3.1 as an OS and I had no idea what Android was functionally. I have a flip phone so I have yet to experience a smartphone experience and had 0 hands on time with Android. I was so blown away by the idea that I would have purchased any OS just to try my hands on this technology. I tried pre ordering it, no luck, I tried ebaying it, no luck. I thought I was sunk. I had followed this product from the rumor stage to the release date and now I had no way of getting it. Well I finally did get it late June 2011 and have been using it ever since. From here on out I will be letting you know how it works in a function setting and whether or not it makes sense to own one.
I will also be review software on windows, linux and android (don't have a mac and I don't recommend anything I haven't personally tried). This is my first attempt at a blog so bare with me if you stumble upon this or if I beg you to look at it :)
