Random reflections on being connected in 2008
This year I learnt a pile of new things:
At least one hospital cares little about mobile phone use. As my son was being born, a phone rang in the corner of the operating theatre. My other half started blaming me, but the consultant answered her phone so ending the argument.
Hospital walls are too thick for good 3g reception. I spent many a night browsing online with my laptop in a hospital room on mobile broadband, but it kept falling back to 2G.
Some cameraphones really do have good enough cameras. On an increasing number of occasions I have left my real camera at home, instead taking a mobile. I even went to a wedding with just my cameraphone.
Working for a company that is bought by a larger competitor has plus sides. Can’t talk in detail here.
Flash/SSD drives for laptops transform the convenience of using laptops. It’s their quietness as much as their speed that makes them a pleasure to use. Hopefully in 2009 I’ll be saying how much better their reliability is as well. It’s too soon to say now.
TV set-top boxes are becoming louder than PCs. Plus, they crash about as often, based on my experience with a UK pay TV DVR supported by a little Google searching.
Babies can be distracted from using your laptop with a fake keyboard. But only a real mobile phone will satisfy them.
WiFi works better for location finding in cities than GPS. Mobile handset GPS’ have particularly poor reception indoors. Even dedicated GPS units struggle.
Dell’s next day on-site repair is less convenient than a drop off service. Having to wait at home for several days in succession during a repeated failure to repair a PC is a much greater waste of time than using a repair centre.
No idea whether this will work (no “preview” button here), but let’s give it a shot…
You may note that hospitals only started to ban mobile phones when those insanely expensive “special hospital phone” units became available. There are one or two pieces of hospital equipment that might be affected by mobile phone signals, but stronger signals happen quite often anyway, so they are already shielded. As with aircraft and petrol stations, it’s pure scaremongering.
Well, they are basically PCs now.
But they have to be small, which means less room for decent cooling. Which in turn leads to noise and crashes…
RogerBW
December 17, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Yes, pretty much every gadget is a mini-computer now.
Crashing is still bad, just because PCs freeze, that doesn’t make it ‘OK’.
btw – I can edit any existing comment. So, if something doesn’t appear right let me know and I’ll fix.
Ian Fogg
December 19, 2008 at 2:14 pm