8•30•05 - A week with only my Treo...

So I just realized that I've been using a Treo for about a year and a half now, yet I still carry my laptop with me everywhere I go. Today I had to pause and ask myself why. I got my 650 back in February. Before that, I had a 600 for almost a year. I also have an IBM Thinkpad T41 and I've had one laptop or another for the last 5 or 6 years. Before my Treo, I couldn't imagine life without my laptop. I use it at my desk. I use it at home. I use it when consulting. For a while, I had a nice EVDO card and was blessed to be in the San Diego area when only SD and Las Vegas had EVDO coverage. It took portability to a new level. Yet, today, I was forced to ask myself why I still carry my laptop around everywhere I go. After all, my Treo 650 works everywhere in the world except Japan and N/S Korea. It has 24x7 data connections available. In a smaller form factor, it provides everything my laptop provides.

So today I decided to spend one week using only my Treo whenever possible. Now, realisticly, there are times when I will need my laptop. As examples, I do network diagrams in Visio and need my laptop for this. I use Photoshop for image editing and need my laptop for this too. However, I believe that for about 90% of what I use my laptop for, I can use my Treo instead. So my goal is this: I will continue to use my laptop on my desk as my primary workstation, Mon thru Fri, from when I get to the office until I'm ready to leave. However, in the morning's before work and the evenings after work, I'll only use my Treo. For meetings, etc when I would normally take my laptop, I'll instead take only my Treo. In fact, my laptop will remain on my desk when I go home at night and over the weekend. Considering, that this weekend coming up is a three day holiday weekend and that I'm taking Friday off and making it a four day weekend, this might prove to be a challenge.

To start, here's a list of apps on my Treo650 that I use on a daily basis:

•GoodLink - realtime access to corporate email, calendar, etc. Think of it as Outlook for my Treo.
•ChatterEmail - accesses my three personal POP3 accounts every 15 minutes.
•DocumentsToGo Premium - access to create, view, & edit Word, Excel, & PowerPoint files.
•Directory Assistant - useful for directions and numbers when I don't want to use Blazer
•MobileOptimized.com - used to find the mobile versions of most websites out there.
•MergicVPN, MobileTS, & PSSH - used for remote access to the Windows and Linux systems that I support.

•Also coming along will be my ThinkOutside Stowaway bluetooth keyboard. After all, if I'm to replace my laptop with my Treo, I expect to be doing a lot more typing on my Treo and don't wish to suffer from thumb-cramp. And lest I forget that my Treo is also a phone, also accompanying me will be the excellent Sony Ericsson Akono HBH-662 bluetooth headset.

Check back over the next 7 to 10 days as I update this page with my Treo-only experiences.

8•31•05 - A week with only my Treo... the first evening and morning

Following up on yesterday's comments I decided to jump head on into just using my Treo as exclusively as possible. I headed home for the night with my Treo, BT keyboard, and BT headset. My laptop remained on my desk (powered on in case I needed to remote into it). Just before leaving for the night, I copied my entire My Documents folder (about 700Mb worth) over to my 2GB SD card. From home, while waiting for dinner, I used Blazer to catch up on my favorite sites (Slashdot, OSNews, Engadget, & Treonauts). Each is linked from my mobile portal site (MobileOptimized.com). Shortly after dinner I got my first taste of using the Treo instead of my Thinkpad. I got a call from a co-worker asking why he couldn't get into our webmail. I connected my VPN (via Mergic VPN), then remoted into our Exchange server with MobileTS and found the Information Store service was stopped (unfortunately, this happens every few months). I restarted it, then connected to our webmail URL via Blazer and confirmed all was working. While doing this, GoodLink started chiming with new email, so I knew that mail was flowing properly again. I called my co-worker back from my Treo and confirmed he could get in. After this, it was a quiet evening. I checked the monitoring portal site for my company (we use BB - BB4.org - to monitor all aspects of our network) and I'm in the habit it checking it before going to bed each night just in case something were to be down and I have to be at the office early. All was good and I set TreoAlarm to wake me up at 5:15am.

This morning I awoke to TreoAlarm and got going. I opened up the OliveTree Bible software and checked the historical reading schedule (I'm working my way through the Bible in historical order instead of written order) to determine where to start reading this morning, though for the reading I used my regular Bible instead of the OliveTree software on my Treo. Just prior to hitting the road to the office, I checked my email and calendar in GoodLink so I'd have a fresh idea of what my day would hold. I also checked my 3 POP accounts in ChatterEmail, deleted a host of spam (so I don't have to delete it again later in Thunderbird), fwd'd on a few messages, and replied to one or two personal emails. On the way into the office, I remembered that I'm supposed to go see March of the Penguins one night this week. So I fired up Blazer, went over to MobileOptimized.com, then to the Entertainment link and to the Yahoo! Movies page. I updated it to my local zip code, then searched for "March Penguins", got my results, and saved the page for later viewing. (I know, I know... browsing the web while driving isn't exactly the safest thing I can do. Thankfully I take surface streets only, no freeways, and there's very little traffic at 6:30am in the morning).

8•31•05 - A week with only my Treo... Day 1

Today proved to be an interesting day for my Treo. I suffered from two issues today: 1) I had to keep reminding myself to do things on my Treo instead of my Thinkpad and 2) Cingular/AT&T Wireless had some sort of intermittent data issues today that resulted in my GoodLink and ChatterEmail clients not being able get my email to me as often as normal, and at one point caused a soft reset. Other than this, though, it was a good day all around. I spent quite some time in my server room restoring a failed Dell server. My Treo came in handy when I snapped off a picture of the s/n and express service code. I was then able to look at the picture while on the Dell website and get the updates I needed. I used the regular memo app in three meetings today to take notes and mVoice once to record a fantastic idea I had while down in my server room. While at lunch, I got a page that the apache process had failed on a production web-server, established a VPN connection, then used pssh to login and restart the process (after determining that a planned update had failed to restart it).

And then it was off to go shopping with my wife. As you can see from the image below, I thoroughly enjoy seeing my hard-earned money be frivolously spent away at over-priced establishments like Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn...

But in the end it wasn't all bad. After almost choking when my wife said she wanted to spent $1200.00 on new bedding at Pottery Barn, I pulled up both Froogle and Ebay from the shopping link at MobileOptimized and found I could get the same goods, brand new for closer to $400.00. Needless to say the wife isn't happy about having to wait, but at least my account isn't going to be negative before my paycheck hits. After this, it was a simple search with Directory Assistant for the phone number to our favorite steak house to make reservations... and then to pull a map from the mall we were at. Of course, then things took another turn for the worse. It seems that President Bush is in my neighborhood today and they shut down the freeway temporarily for his motorcade. In San Diego, when the 5 gets shut down for even 15 minutes, traffic backs up for an hour. Thankfully, Directory Assistant stores your searches, so I was able to very quickly locate the restaurant's number again and have my wife call and push out our reservation.

9•6•05 - A week with only my Treo... Days 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6...

So like many Americans, I took advantage of the 3 day Labor Day weekend, though in my case it was a tad longer as I left work early on Thursday and headed out of town Friday morning. As much as I'm not a fan of $3/gallon gas prices, they did have the effect of keeping everyone else off the road as there was very little traffic for a holiday weekend. So, on Friday morning began what I think was the hardest part of being with only my Treo. I'm a fulltime IT employee as well as a parttime IT consultant. The end result is that something always fails over a holiday weekend, that I always need an internet connection, and that I always bring my laptop with me. Not so for this trip. I left the laptop (and EVDO card) at home. I even travelled with just one cellphone (My Treo) instead of two as I normally do.

The first thing I did Friday morning was to set Directory Assistant to Visalia, CA (my destination for the weekend), then had it check the local weather for the area; this before packing. I didn't bother to check traffic reports since I'd be going through OC & LA... no matter which freeway I took, I expected to hit some traffic. Since my wife always takes longer to pack than I do, I spent about 30 minutes catching up on local news via links from my site... MobileOptimized.com.

About halfway through the trip, I got an email from a consulting client via ChatterEmail. Their new laptop had arrived and they needed to get it on the domain and were asking for instructions. They were going out of town Monday night, so it couldn't wait til I returned to work Tuesday. Since I was on the road, I simply called them back and walked them through the process. My Sony Ericsson HBH-662 BT headset was awesome for this... great sound quality even with AC fans and the radio in the background, not to mention 4 kids that don't fully grasp the need to be quiet when daddy's on the phone.

Saturday was fairly quiet. I audited my emails for any system issues that needed immediate attention, then caught up on the news. I got a techie call sometime in the afternoon, but was able to convince the user to just turn off the system until Tuesday. Dinner time, came, though and we decided we wanted sushi, but didn't know where to go. I did a quick search at Google Mobile for "best sushi visalia, ca", then copied the business name into Directory Assistant and did a search for their phone and address. After calling to make a reservation, I used the map function of DA to link into Mapquest and get directions from where I was staying.

Sunday was a different story. I awoke to multiple emails from a server and one from a consulting client. It seems something had failed, so he tried to restart something, and now I was getting emailed every 5 minutes. I spent a good 30 minutes getting passwords stored in STRIP, then using pssh to get into the failed system (for you linux admins, you know how frustrating it can be to have to ssh into one box, then su, then hop to yet another box and provide a different password at each hop). Eventually, I got everything fixed and spent some time catching up on news and such.

Sunday afternoon was our BBQ at the pool day. After about 30 minutes of being under the sun in 95+ degree temperatures and not a cloud in sight, I wasn't trusting my sunscreen. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember what the heck "SPF" meant. Did SPF 45 mean I was safe for 45 minutes? Or maybe 4.5 times longer than w/o sunscreen. No one else seemed to know either and the label on the bottle was thrashed. So I went over to Mobile Answers and searched for "SPF 45". I immediately had a nice explanation of what SPF meant and how many times I needed to re-apply my sunscreen.

Monday I started off checking the news as normal, then realized I had forgotten to put some backup jobs on hold. If they aren't put on hold, they'll hang the server after about 8 hours (don't ask... its Windows... need I say more?). So I used MergicVPN to remote into the server and used MobileTS to remote the desktop and put the backup jobs on hold. After packing to head home, I set Directory Assistant back to my home neighborhood to check local weather and see if I'd need a sweatshirt, etc. Ten hours later, I was back home in Carlsbad.

All told, it was quite nice to not have to lug around my laptop. Granted, I have a nice, lightweight one with good battery life, but one less thing to carry is always nice. Looking back, I realize that I did on my Treo everything that I'd normally do on my laptop: I checked email and news daily; I remoted into a linux host with pssh; I remoted into a Windows host with a VPN and MobileTS; I did a few searches, etc. One of the things I read over the weekend was an interesting article from Andrew at Treonauts about the Palm/Smartphone device replacing the common PC (he added more to it today). While I don't agree with everything he wrote, I couldn't help but notice how I was doing just that... I was using my Treo as a full replacement to my primary computer.

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