Over the past cou­ple weeks I’ve been try­ing a new exper­i­ment. Now that I’ve embraced the “net­book lifestyle,” I thought I’d see what this cloud com­put­ing thing was really all about. While I have Microsoft Office 2007 loaded on my HP Mini-​Note, I thought I’d try Google apps instead.

The way I see it, there’s two dif­fer­ent par­a­digms to use with netbooks.

1. Thin client, or web-​based. Using web-​based appli­ca­tions and liv­ing out of the browser. This has become much more fea­si­ble than it used to be, and oth­ers have made a pretty good go of using only Fire­fox for all their com­put­ing needs. And thanks to Google Gears, you can even work offline (albeit with some pretty sig­nif­i­cant limitations).
2. Thick client, or what used to be called client-​server com­put­ing. Here you use tra­di­tional desk­top soft­ware and either store your data in the cloud or sync your data through the cloud to other PCs.

Tech­ni­cally there is a third option, just using the net­book like any other com­puter and not using net­worked data at all, but where’s the fun in that?

The most pop­u­lar option, at least among the tech­no­rati, is option one. Google’s office suite (Gmail, Docs, Note­book, Cal­en­dar) does a pretty good job of replac­ing heav­ier client-​side apps like Microsoft Office or OpenOf­fice. And if you’re using a com­puter designed to be online all the time, why not use online tools?

Sup­ple­ment­ing Google’s suite with a few addi­tional ser­vices like Remem­ber The Milk for task man­age­ment and ScribeFire’s Fire­fox plu­gin for blog­ging, I tried this out for a week. I even ditched Exchange on my Treo and used GooSync and MilkSync along with Gmail’s IMAP ser­vice to use Google ser­vices on Win­dows Mobile (which works, but not as well as Android, alas). I used Gears to allow offline use in RTM, Docs, etc. And it worked, sorta.

I tried to like it, I really did. And the inte­gra­tion between Google Docs, Note­book and iGoogle is pretty com­pelling. I was able to keep my doc­u­ments online and edit­ing them was fast and easy. I expect I’d like Google Docs a lot more if I was doing any active col­lab­o­ra­tion, it looks really good for that. But the lim­i­ta­tions got to me. You can’t cre­ate a new doc­u­ment in Google Docs when you’re offline, among other things.

Because that’s what really made the deci­sion for me. It’s easy to get online with a net­book, but it’s not a given. I’ve found that WiFi hotspots are far more com­mon that I would have sus­pected, but they’re not every­where. I can tether my net­book to my Treo pretty eas­ily, but that involves a cable (I can’t seem to get it work­ing with Blue­tooth or WiFi, even with PdaNet), which means a sta­ble setup where I’m going to be for a while. For quick work, jot­ting some­thing down quickly (10 min­utes or less) set­ting up a cel­lu­lar inter­net con­nec­tion is too much of a has­sle. And as a result, I wasn’t using my net­book as often as I could have.

If I was using an even smaller net­book, like the Asus eee 700 series with just 4GB of flash and pretty much instant-​on Linux, I’d be more inclined to make web-​based apps work. But I have an XP-​based net­book with a 120GB hard drive. I have the abil­ity to use local stor­age, local soft­ware and the full power of Win­dows. Why not use it along with the best of cloud com­put­ing? (and yes, there is a vision for more, but I’ll get to that in another article)

So instead of liv­ing in the clouds, I’ve got a core group of local soft­ware that ties into the cloud for stor­age and sync, allow­ing me to work offline with no com­pro­mises when I have to, but have all the ben­e­fits of the net when can. I’ll detail my set up soon, but for now, how are you using cloud computing?

I’m sit­ting at Chipo­tle putting the fin­ish­ing touches on an arti­cle about decid­ing between using thick clients (Word, Out­look) ver­sus thin clients (Google Docs, Gmail) on net­books, and a guy walks up to me and stares until I take out my ear­buds (one of the rea­sons I love writ­ing at Chipo­tle is that between my hear­ing dam­age and my –20db head­phones, it’s actu­ally less dis­tract­ing here than at home).

He points at my HP Mini-​note. “Where do you get a com­puter like that?” He explains that he needs to get a PC for his daugh­ter in high school.

I tell him that for a high schooler, I wouldn’t actu­ally rec­om­mend the HP, as it’s a lit­tle pricier than the com­pe­ti­tion. I tell him about the Asus eee 1000, which has a 10” screen, comes pre­loaded with XP and could run all the stuff she needs for school. Then I tell him he can find it locally at Best Buy for $399.

His eyes nearly pop out of his head, and he starts grin­ning widely. I make note of this, and he says, “Wow, that’s such a great deal.” He booked out of the restau­rant and I’d bet dol­lars to donuts he was headed straight for Best Buy.

I see this sort of thing all the time. I’ve talked before about my 12-​year-​old niece’s netbook-​lust, and the other day when she brought her friend over while I was at my sister’s for the Bron­cos humil­i­at­ing defeat by game against the Patri­ots, her friend was also star struck at the pos­si­bil­i­ties afforded by a com­puter of her very own that she could take anywhere.

Paul Thur­rott and Leo Laporte dis­cussed net­books in this week’s Win­dows Weekly pod­cast (along with soundly thrash­ing Win­dows Mobile) and dis­missed them as a tem­po­rary bridge between tra­di­tional lap­tops and future smart­phones run­ning desktop-​class oper­at­ing sys­tems. While I like the idea of a Win­dows smart­phone run­ning the same Win­dows ker­nel as the desk­top ver­sion, using the same API for pro­grams and hav­ing binary com­pat­i­bil­ity with desk­top Win­dows, but using a user inter­face opti­mized for mobile use, that doesn’t obvi­ate netbooks.

I’ve used mobile phones for years as stand-​ins for ultra-​mobile PCs, and the prob­lem isn’t the oper­at­ing sys­tem or appli­ca­tions. As evi­denced by the pop­u­lar­ity of not only net­books but devices like the Celio Red­fly, form fac­tor mat­ters. A clamshell device with a larger screen and touch-​typable key­board is just bet­ter for some things. I post blog entries and read Google Reader from both my Treo and my Mininote, but I read ebooks exclu­sively on the Treo and write longer form work exclu­sively on the Mininote. It’s about using the right tool for the right job, and it’s becom­ing increas­ing obvi­ous every day that net­books are the tools a lot of peo­ple have been wait­ing for.

Spent most of the day run­ning around with my dad look­ing for net­books retail. Best Buy has the Asus eee 1000HD and the MSI Wind, both run­ning XP, along with the older 7″ Linux-​based eee.

The eee 1000HD is actu­ally pretty impres­sive, and would be a con­tender if it weren’t sad­dled with a last gen Celeron M proces­sor. Granted, my trusty HP Mini-​Note runs on a Via C7-​M, so who am I to crit­i­cize, really. Keyboard’s nice, though.

The MSI Wind, on the other hand… I can see why this seems to be the run­away suc­cess of the net­book set. It’s nearly inden­ti­cal in size to my HP, with a com­fort­able key­board, a spiffy Atom proces­sor and even one more USB port than I have on my HP. It’s impres­sive, and upgrade­able to the capa­bil­i­ties of a “real” lap­top, given that Josh just upgraded his to 2GB of RAM and a 200GB 7200rpm hard drive.

There’s a rea­son this is the only seg­ment of the PC mar­ket that’s actu­ally grow­ing. Should be inter­est­ing to see what Microsoft has to say at PDC this week about how Win­dows 7 will run on lower-​power PCs.

The big news out of Cuper­tino today was more of the same. While a lot of the tech press, yours truly included, expected Apple to announce a net­book (albeit a pricey one at $800), what we got was more 13 and 15 inch Mac­books that look pretty much like the ones already on the mar­ket. The old plas­tic Mac­book dropped in price to “under a thou­sand dol­lars” (that would be $999) but it’s still 13 inches and over four pounds. Pass.

When asked why Apple wasn’t releas­ing a net­book in the Q&A, Jobs replied that net­books are still a “nascent” mar­ket and Apple doesn’t do that. That’s a may be, but that also means that Apple is glee­fully ignor­ing 37% of the mar­ket, which, oh, by the way, just hap­pens to be the only part that’s actu­ally grow­ing.

Given that it’s pretty easy to put OS X on a net­book if you really want to, maybe this is for the best. Let Apple keep their over­priced shiny to them­selves, and the next gen­er­a­tion of mobile com­put­ing will just move on with­out them.

Jason Per­low has an inter­est­ing arti­cle over on ZDnet about how the eco­nomic cri­sis might spur IT inno­va­tion to save costs. He’s focused mostly on a top-​down, enterprise-​focused “how the heck can we afford this dat­a­cen­ter” per­spec­tive, but it got me think­ing about netbooks.

Before long y’all are going to be as tired as my RL friends of hear­ing about net­books. I’ve recently pur­chased an HP 2133 Mini-​note, and it has com­pletely changed how I approach using a com­puter. I really think these small, cheap, “under-​specced” lap­tops are going to change com­put­ing. And it occurs to me that they might have appeared at a his­tor­i­cally per­fect moment.

The thing about net­books is that they can be so small and cheap pre­cisely because they don’t do as much as a “real” lap­top. Now over time the def­i­n­i­tion of a real lap­top has changed to the point that my writ­ing partner’s 15” lap­top has more power and bet­ter gam­ing per­for­mance than my desk­top, but that’s beside the point. Net­books are good enough to do about 80% of what you’d want to do with a com­puter. They’re great at email, surf­ing, light media (for instance, as I write this in Win­dows Live Writer, I have Out­look and Fire­fox open as well as tunes in Win­dows Media Player; works fine). In other words, they’re the per­fect sec­ond or kid’s PC for most fam­i­lies. As long as you’ve got one big desk­top in the home for the other 20% work, why would you buy any­thing but net­books from then on?

As we slowly stag­ger into the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son, expect to see net­books sales sky­rocket while sales of desk­top and larger lap­tops tapers off.

Eco­nomic cri­sis as a tech­nol­ogy change agent | Tech Broiler | ZDNet.com