MAKE MINE MOBILE

Dick Pountain/15 June 2008 16:11/Idealog 167

Way back in PC Pro issue 125 I wrote about my mobile computing setup, and I ended that column with this wish-list of a sentence: "If mobile phone bandwidth ever became wide and cheap enough, I could easily be seduced away from a PC to some kind of thin-client with a decent screen and keyboard, like a Thinkpad X40 with most of its guts removed." Well folks, after only 4 years it's finally happened. I'm submitting this column from my house in Italy over the TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile) Alice mobile data network, admittedly at the modest speed of 380Kbps. It may be slow compared to the 8Mbps BT broadband I have in London, but it's still fast enough to make Flickr usable and to watch YouTube videos without them halting all the time. And it's not costing me an arm and leg but just €20 per month.

I also have that ultra-slim hardware platform I wished for thanks to Santa Claus, who brought me a Sony Viao TZ21 this year. This slim and elegant carbon-fibre cased device is proving every bit as usable as PC Pro's rave review claimed it would be. The screen may be only 11" diagonal, but its 1,366x768 resolution and astonishingly vivid colour make it a pleasure to look at. I have no problem with the size of type because all the applications I read or write in - Opera, MS Word, Textpad, Adobe Reader - permit me to easily zoom to a sensible size. I recently discovered the invaluable Canadian Internet Archive site (www.archive.org) which contains lots and lots of classic books in a variety of useful formats, included scanned PDFs. Reading these latter in Adobe Reader, full screen mode and two pages up on the lovely Vaio screen comes pretty close to reading a proper book, yellowed pages, margin notes and all.

The small flat keyboard looks as though it might be tricky to type on but I became accustomed to it quite quickly, and its feel is actually excellent: I'm writing a book on it at the moment with no qualms at all. The sub-1.5 kilogram weight makes the Vaio a pleasure to carry on aeroplanes, and I stash it in an anonymous-looking rubberised fisherman's shoulder bag that won't attract too many laptop snatchers (though it may of course attract predatory anglers). Battery life exceeds five hours and can even stretch to seven at a pinch, which makes all kinds of outdoor working feasible for the first time. In fact I wrote this paragraph at 5400 feet on the summit of Monte Nerone, just to show off. 

The only fly in the ointment was that the Vaio came with Vista Professional, but I have to confess that I've learned to live with it and am even starting to like some bits, like the improve Explorer views and search facilities. What I will never learn to love is the stupid and dangerous way Vista helpfully selects windows or presses buttons you're only hovering over while thinking what to next: one day it will do real damage. I've tried everything to turn this feature off, but with no success so far.

So, a very practical hardware platform then, but what about mobile connectivity to match? Well, the TZ21 has an internal slot to take an HSDPA SIM, and even came with a T-Mobile SIM and software ready to be activated. Trouble is they want £30 per month, more than I pay for my BT Broadband and it won't work in Italy where I need it. I'm in mountains way beyond the nearest ADSL exchange, but with a stonking great TIM mast right across the valley. For six months I tried one solution after another: various pay-as-you-go GPRS-only SIMs, but despite scouring the forums and downloading the highly-recommended free MWConn software I couldn't make any of them work. I tried PDAnet which lets me to use my Treo as a modem, but the requisite TIM mobile phone tariff was no more sensible than T-Mobile's deal. So I went to the TIM shop in my nearest town, where a helpful and knowledgable young man (how unlike Tottenham Court Road!) strained my Italian to its limits in explaining the options. The upshot was a UMTS dongle that plugs into a USB port rather than the internal SIM slot, at the aforesaid €20/month. Mobile columnist Paul Ockenden suggests I try swapping the SIM out of the dongle into the Viao's internal slot, but at the moment I'm too chicken.

So, have I completed the dream by running remote applications and data like a proper thin-client? Only up to a point. I don't use Google Documents to write with, but I do use Google Mail, taking advantage of its ability to merge several mail accounts: all my Cix and BT mail now redirects through GMail whose interface I've come to really enjoy using. I do also use exploit huge free space Google gives you to store remote backups of my book in progress, but I still write in a local copy of Office 2007, and still back up locally too onto a Lacie USB hard drive and sundry USB keys. I'm neither brave enough nor daft enough to trust my whole life to Google just yet...