A stupid o’clock start to get to the airport this morning, and in my bleary-eyed funk in the back of the cab I have realised two things.
One is totally trivial. Do I need to take the keyboard out of my bag at security checks, a la laptop? I have no idea but people in uniform with probes intimidate me.
The second is more fundamental. By connecting a keyboard and mouse occasionally to my phone it’s made me realise that it is by far the most powerful computing device I own. In turn, that’s made me change the way in which I’m using it even in more conventional touch-screen mode. In the cab I was flicking through a slide deck that I’m working on, and whereas before I’d have waiting until the laptop to make a few minor tweaks, I was editing away in the Slides app.
There’s something psychological about perception of power of a device being determined by its size. It still fires My head a bit that I can take an output and power a big screen through an HDMI connection. These perceptions are changing.
It should also be looked at in the context of being a Chromebook user. The Asus is a capable little device (I even had it running full Ubuntu last week, just because I could). But the price (less than 2/3 of the cost of the Nexus) is reflected in its capability.
Does this mean I just need a more powerful laptop? Well… No. Not now that I’ve had 12 months of all of my activity being in the Cloud. The apps that I use regularly tend to follow at least some of the “7 reasons to App” principals I’ve spoken about before, but with the keyboard and mouse attached it’s still generally easier to use browser versions of the services I need.
mmitII 