This interesting story at Computerworld UK came to via @sascha_p through Twitter. There are some very tasty nuggets of information in the story that looks at data collected via a PriceGrabber.com Consumer Behavior Report.

It seems that the emerging (or "nascent" in Apple's words) netbook category has manufacturers in a "race to the bottom", according to a Sony representative, and that traditional notebook sales are being cannabalised.

I know many netbook owners (I have a couple of them myself) and no a single one of them uses the netbook as their main computer. However, it has in some cases brought them into the notebook market. For example, some folks have a desktip system and would like a notebook. Until recently, that meant an investment of several hundred dollars just for an entry level unit. Now, they can buy an entry level Eee PC for about $330AUD. In that sense, they actually making the mobile computer market larger.

However, in these depressed economic times, many are skipping on the current round of laptop replacements and are either hanging on to older hardware or replacing with a netbook.

Are you contemplating a new notebook? Is a decent netbook in your calculations?

Forgive me the cryptic headline (fans of the Robert Redford movie Sneakers will know what I mean). Over at The Age a product round up on password managers has just been published.

In a utopian version of the world we live in, all information would be freely shared. But that's not how things are and most of us are drowning in usernames and passwords that we need to somehow remember in order to access information.

You can read it in the Green Guide supplement if you're in Melbourne (Asustralia, not Florida) or online by clicking this link.

 Passwords • Privacy • Secrets

Over at Hydrapinion I've mused on what I do to avoid my data becoming fragmented while I'm out of the office.

The problem is, when I'm away from the office for more than a few hours, something that happens practically every day, the information I have on my laptop and the information back home are out of sync.

 Data • Mobility

Over the last couple of years I signed up for and tried several different social networking sites. I've had accounts with MySpace (great for meeting 19 year old Russian girls called Svetlana, if you're into that sort of thing, but not much else in my case), Friends Reunited (used to be School Friends), Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I've been invited to several others but declined as I simply don't have any spare time.

After lots of experimenting, I've consolidated the sites I'll use and I've closed dowen my other accounts. I'm sticking with Facebook (here's my profile page) as its ability to make it easy to share stuff with friends is very clean and easy to use. There are sufficient controls for managing incoming friend requests and I really like being able to use Facebook from my iPhone.

Twitter is the other tool I'm sticking with. Running Twhirl on my Mac and either Twitterific or Tweetie on my iPhone (I've not yet settled on whaich application I prefer) I'm finding that the random tidbits that come from my friends and followers (they're Twitter terms for people you follow or that follow you) are incredibly interesting. Sure, there a are a few "having peanut butter sandwiches for lunch" posts but many people are sharing interesting URLs, photos and thoughts. I'm even getting PR pitches which is great as the forced brevity of Twitter (messages are limited to 140 characters) focusses the pitch. Also, it's very quick to say "yes" or "no" in response whereas an email takes significantly more time.

My other accounts are all either closed or in the process of closure. One thing that's improved over the last year or so is the ability to close an account. Thus far, all of the sites I was a member of have had a simple "Cancel Memebership" function.

Having two, quite diverse tools also lets me keep my personal and professional worlds from colliding. Facebook is basically reserved for my more personal contacts. As a general rule, I won't accept a Facebook friend request from someone I've never met. In the words of a colleague, to be a Facebook friend we'll need to have "shared a moment". That might be socialising at a conference or something similar but I usually won't accept a request from someone I don't know.

With Twitter, I've expanded my network significantly over the last week. With Twitter, I'll generally follow anyone that follows me. There are a few exceptions to that but if I'm even vaguely interested in what I read from someone's then I'll follow.

So, gentle reader, I'm curious. Which social networking tools do you use? What tools won't you use? Is the whole Facebook/MySpace/Twitter thing complete rubbish or does it have a place in our evolving society?

 Facebook • Social Media • Twitter

It's fun being a tech reviewer. I get to play with lots of interesting toys and gadgets. One I recently played with is HP's EliteBook 6930p and my review has popped up in The Age in the Green Guide supplement. Also, you can read it online here.

 HP EliteBook • laptops

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon catching up on my filing and paperwork. To be honest, it's one of my least liked tasks. I guess if I was a little more disciplined I wouldn't let it mount up (six months is a little too long) but it's such a boring task and I can always find something more interesting to do.

Part of the problem has been that my filing system was just too cumbersome. I had a couple of folders for bills, three for different bank statements, one for tax and so on. As various bits of paper arrived, I'd sort them and put them into their folders. It sounds good in theory but as soon as stuff mounts up a little the effort it takes to get stuff sorted is too great. So I put off, it accumulates more, the task gets even bigger and... well, you get the picture.

This year, I've decided on an new approach. I'm going to have a single folder for this year. It's divided into sections for each of the various categories of paperwork. This approach has two significant advantages for me

1 - It's easier as everything is filed in one place. When a new piece of paper comes in I have one place to put it.

2 - Under Australian tax law, I'm obliged to retain certain records for five years. Now, at the end of their retention period I just need to dispose of one folder. Under my old system, I'd have to got through several folders to get rid of the papers.

There was a time when I used a filing cabinet but that was way too messy. I prefer binders and I think this new approach, of having a binder per year, makes staying organised easier.

What's your approach?

It was only a few short weeks ago that Melbourne consumer electronics maker Ruslan Kogan was big news at CES. He had produced and was about to sell the Kogan Agora, a new smartphone running Google's mobile operating system Android. But sadly Kogan today announced that the Agora would not be going to market and the existing customers would be getting a refund. Asher Moses covered the story at The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

I think this is a great pity. There are precious few developers and small manufacturers who are prepared to take a chance on creating something new. At least the news isn't all bad. Although Kogan was ready to start selling the Agora, it seems that he'll be doing a redesign, mainly to deliver a higher resolution screen in order to ensure compatibility for a wider range of applications.

I've noticed a few comments on Twitter that were less than complimentary. To all the stone-throwers - lay off Kogan. He's taken a huge gamble and laid his cash and reputation on the line. I hope that he can bounce back and deliver a butt-kicking, moderately priced smartphone.

 Google Android • Kogan Agora

In researching what will be one of many stories on Windows 7 I'm sure I'll write over the next few months, I've been installing the beta version of Windows 7 (Build 7000) on just about any PC I can get my hands on. One of my test systems is an Eee PC 900.

Just to make sure we're all on the same page here, the pertinent specifications of the Eee PC 900 are:

Display: 8.9" Display running at 1024 x 600
CPU: Intel® Celeron M353 clocked at 900MHz
Networking: WLAN Built-in 802.11b/g and RJ45 10/100 Mbps
RAM: 1GB of DDR II
Storage: 4GB and 8GB disks and SD/MMC slot
Webcam: 1.3MP

As you can tell, this is not going to be a Windows powerhouse. In fact, the Windows Experience Index (a measure of how well a system will run Windows 7) gives a score of just 1.0 - the lowest score. It's worth noting that this score is a reflection of the system's "weakest" component. in the Eee PC 900's case the integrated graphics card pulled the score down.

The Eee PC actually fails to meet one of Windows 7's minimum requirements - available disk space. To install Windows 7 you'll need 9GB of free, contiguous disk space. The Eee PC 900 has a total of 12GB but that's spilt into two separate disks of 4GB and 8BG. However, I was still able to complete the installation with about 1GB of space left on the larger disk. The installation did fail on the first attempt but when I started it over it was able to complete. I had the same experience on another system so it seems that the installer is smart enough to skip over problematic stages.

Once Windows 7 was installed (about an hour using an external DVD drive), it booted up perfectly. It's worth noting that Microsoft has really managed to get the installation process right. Other than some localisation information, I was able to walk away from the installation and come back once it had completed. There weren't any "Click to Restart" dialogs or other such nonsense.

I wasn't all that surprised to find that the Eee PC 900's display was limited to plain VGA after the installation. Clearly, Microsoft hasn't included every possible hardware driver. However, on the Eee and other systems, i;ve found that Windows Vista and XP drivers work just fine. The only potential "gotcha" is that the driver installers provided by manufacturers may not work. in that case, run them in compatibility mode for XP or Vista and they should be fine. I ran the Eee's driver installer in XP compatibility mode and it worked well. You won't get the full Aero experience but I'm not sure that it's worth the overhead in any case.

Using Windows 7 on the Eee PC was surprisingly good. I had low expectations but found that even with some antivirus software installed the system was reasonably responsive. However, I'd strongly suggest that anyone using Windows 7 on such an underpowered system go into the Performance Setting and manage those settings yourself rather than letting Windows work it out for you. I disabled almost every visual enhancement other than "Use visual styles on windows and buttons". This made a significant improvement to the Eee PC's overall zippiness.

Wireless networking worked without any problems although my impression is that wireless range is a little weaker under Windows 7 than XP or Ubuntu. As radio strength can be controlled by software it may be that a driver update will fix this. However, the difference wasn't huge and certainly didn't impact my testing. It was just that places that had a solid five bars of signal now drifted between four and five bars.

I've not been able to get the webcam working yet. It needs a driver but I can't find my Eee PC CD at the moment and I could find the driver on the Asus website. I suspect that once I find a driver it'll be fine. Perhaps someone's sorted that out. If you have, leave me a comment or use Twitter to let me know.

Finally, I've noticed that the power management side of things still needs some work and that the suspend/resume functionality is a little broken. It's not a showstopper for me as the Eee PC isn't a main system for me (my MacBook Air is my principal mobile computer).

What I'd like to see in a future release of Windows 7 is a "netbook" installation. I know that would add a step to the installation process but being able to leave off stuff like the games and some of the accessories would slim the installation back leaving more hard disk free. Also, I suspect that I'll be able to eek out further performance gains by playing with the service that launch automatically. I'm not too fussed about the driver issues - this is Beta 1 so it's not surprising that it's not 100% complete.

If your Eee PC 900 (or better - I don't recommend Windows 7 for an Eee PC 700) isn't a critical working machine for you and you can spare the bandwidth, installing Windows 7 certainly won't hurt your system.

Another of my stories has cropped up at PC Update. this one's on the MyNetPhone Virtual PBX. Taking advantage of your web connection and VoIP, this is a very cost effective way to bring the functionality of a PBX to your business without the significant infrastructure costs.

...a virtual PABX through MyNetFone would cost. Like most VoIP services, there's a monthly fee. The entry point is $60 per month. For that you get a 1300 number so customers can call you for the cost of a local call, 250 local and national calls with extras charged at a flat 10c each, mobile calls at 15c per minute with no flagfall, international calls from 19c per minute with no flagfall, SMS messaging at 15c per message, five inbound phone numbers and two phone lines.

The full story can be read here.

 MyNetFone • Virtual PBX

I recently penned a story for PC Update - the magazine published to Members of the world's second largest PC user group, The Melbourne PC User Group.

The story is a review of a couple of members of the Eee PC family; the Eee Box and Eee PC 1000h.

We can see the Eee Box finding a place in many homes and small offices. Given the $429 purchase price, a home network with two or three Eee Boxes and a decent NAS for centralised storage would be a very functional arrangement. However, if you crave lots of grunt for playing the latest games then the Eee Box B202 is not suitable.

When it comes to the Eee PC 1000h, it's a more difficult recommendation. It's a very good unit but there's a lot of competition in the laptop market around that price-point.

You can read the whole article here.

 Eee Box • Eee PC

Over at Hydrapinion, I'm back on deck after a short summer break. This week, I take a look into my crystal ball and try to predict what's coming up in the world of mobility this year. I'm even game enough to look at last year's predictions and let you in on whether I was close to getting it right or not.

Here's the link - click, read and enjoy.

 2009 Predictions

Macworld Expo 2009

As Bob Dylan sang in the 1960s - "the times, they are a-changin'". If the Macworld Expo 2009, Apple's last appearance at this iconic annual event, tells us anything, it tells us that Apple is a company in transition. This is a process that began a couple of years ago with Apple moving to Intel processors and changing its name. At this year's Expo that continued with Steve Jobs not even rating a mention during Phil Schiller's address.

I've heard this year's keynote presentation described as low key, subdued, boring and dull. However, when I think back to the keynote about three years ago all we got then were some new hardware announcements (well, this year we got the new unibody 17" MacBook Pro), new iLife and iWork releases and the usual "state of the union" type address such as sales data, retail store openings and the like. In other words, this was a normal keynote address. the ones we've recently had with iPhone announcements were the unusual ones.

When Apple announced the all new unibody Macbook and macBook Pro back in October 2008, it was clear that major product announcements could come at any time and that Apple wasn't going to to be tied into anyone else's schedule.

I think what we're about to see is a shift by Apple. Steve jobs is an incredible CEO. Most folks don't remember that Apple was on the brink of disappearing. Steve Jobs' return in 1997 was the beginning of a huge revival. At one stage, Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers, suggested that the best thing Apple could do was fold up their tent and give the remaining value of the business back to the shareholders. Today, Apple's market capitalisation exceeds Dell's by some margin.

Apple is, in my view, about to make a really big push for the hearts, minds and wallets of the business sector. The move to Intel CPUs means that folks can run a quarantined Windows installation for specific applications while retaining the operational benefits of the Mac OS.

iWork 09 now works natively with Microsoft Word files with no need to go through an export step and there's a new, online collaboration engine. Yes, I know that Pages and Numbers lack many of the high end features of Word and Excel but the features those applications have support the vast majority of users. Many people muse that most folks only use 10% of Word's capability but that everyone uses a different 10%. I reckon Pages has 80% of Word's feature set - more than enough for most users and certainly enough to compete and make for a profitable business. In any case, Apple wins the ease of use battle (in my opinion) although i actually like the Office 2007 "ribbon" (many people don't).

What we've learned from this year's Macworld Expo keynote address is that Apple is setting an agenda for the next 10 years and that they are getting serious about the business sector. Their hardware is very good, they have a great operating system and they're now backing that up with a serious push with their productivity apps. When Apple dropped the word "computer" from their name it told us that Apple wants to be more than just a computer business. We're now seeing that intention translate into a strategy and being executed.