At CES I saw several really drool-worthy products, but the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga was among the best, no question, no hesitation. When the company demoed it for us the first time I was immediately impressed and also immediately aware that I needed one of my own.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had this reaction to a Lenovo product. And I’ve been burned in the past. I’ve seen some amazing notebooks and tablets teased and promised at CES only to receive news later that they wouldn’t be coming to market, after all. They swear this is not the case for the Yoga; it’s just waiting for Windows 8 before it can ship to customers. I begrudgingly believe them.
After we saw the Yoga, Josh Smith (my colleague at GottaBeMobile) found an old post on the site from 2009 showing off a Lenovo Yoga that looked very different. It was just a concept design back then, but it shared the dual notebook/tablet nature and the hinge that allowed it to fold all the way back. Further delving into tags revealed an even older Yoga design from 2005 — it actually won an award — that looks very similar in design to what we have now.
You can see all the pictures I found over on the Gadget Porn Tumblr. (Yes, that’s also one of mine.)
Seeing that there was a Yoga all the way back in 2005 yet the product didn’t become a solid reality until 2012 makes me feel better about the Lenovo notebooks I’ve loved and lost. Two years in a row Lenovo showed off the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid, a combo tablet and 11-inch notebook that was actually two computers in one. The display bit would detach and become a tablet — first running Linux, then running Android — with its own CPU, memory, battery, and ports. When attached to the keyboard base it switched to Windows, again with separate memory, ports, battery and so forth.
I wanted this thing so bad, my friends. Lenovo never did bring it out in America, though, because they couldn’t get the hinge/connector up to snuff (so I hear). Even I could tell that this was the weakest point of the design. Still, some of the devices I saw this year gave me hope that the company could get over that hurdle if they so desired.
Another product I’ve always mourned is the Lenovo Skylight. This was meant to be a smartbook, back when smartbooks were deemed a viable notebook category. Here’s a primer if you care, but the basics are that they were meant to be inexpensive notebooks running lightweight operating systems like Windows CE, Android, or similar that acted like smartphones. They’d sleep instead of tuning off, resume instantly, and stay thin thanks to the components inside.
Putting aside the smartbookness of it, the Lenovo Skylight was is one of the best looking laptops I’ve ever seen. It’s not just thin and light, but crafted and designed so well that you instantly want it, no matter what it’s running or what the limitations. The company even brought in the guy who designed the original ThinkPads to create this thing of beauty.
The whole smartbook thing didn’t last. In fact, I don’t think any ever came out. It’s a shame because smartbooks are what netbooks were supposed to be before mainstream consumers started giving their opinions. Anyway, back in 2010 I asked a Lenovo exec if the Skylight was truly dead, because I felt that it would be such a shame if so. He told me: Not quite. Somewhere in the bowels of the company someone still cares about the Skylight.
Given what’s going on with the laptop category right now, I suspect that it’ll be reborn as an ultrabook. As of right now it’s too thin to deal with the components (I think…) but perhaps when the next generation of Intel chips comes out the Skylight can live again. I can also see the U1 Hybrid making a reappearance as a Windows 8 tablet hybrid.
Hopefully it won’t be another 5 years before I see these products again. But if they rises from the ashes as amazing as the Yoga is today, I won’t grumble about the wait too much.
In my preparation for the BlogHer conference (which was awesome!), I wanted to put together several ways to share my contact information with the people I would meet. I have traditional paper business cards, of course. But since I’m a digital geek girl, I also poked into my contact card on my phone and looked into ways I could share it. I assumed that there would be an easy, straightforward way to do this. Sadly for us all, I was wrong.
Sharing contact information via a smartphone is one of those things that many people assume is a basic, standard task. Going all the way back to the days of Palm Pilot supremacy and the rise of BlackBerry, the ability to “beam” your info to another person was a nice and expected perk of having a mobile, business-focused device. I remember that the process didn’t always work on the first try, but it was there and was easy.
Fast forward to now. Last week I went into my Android phone’s contacts, found my contact card, hit the Menu button and tapped “Send My Contact Info.” The menu that came up informed me that I could send via MMS, Mail, or Bluetooth. You might think: oh, that sounds reasonable. Let me explain why it’s not.
MMS is multimedia text messaging; thus, I’d send my contact info as a vCard attachment to an SMS. Not all phones/services support MMS. I use Google Voice for texting. It does not support MMS. So I can’t use that.
The Mail option is what I wanted… except Mail does not indicate the Gmail app, it indicates the Mail app for non-Gmail accounts. I don’t have any accounts set up there because I use Gmail on my Android phone. In order to send via my Gmail account, I would have to set up that account in the Mail app then set it to not notify me when messages come in because Gmail is already doing so. Convoluted? Yes.
Bluetooth is what people meant by “beaming” in the past, but connecting to another phone via Bluetooth isn’t always straightforward. Try doing it in a conference hallway when you’re on the way to the next panel and the person you want to send to doesn’t know how the Bluetooth works on their phone. Not ideal.
So really, my phone offered little in the way of easy or viable options. Why?
The heart of the problem lies with Android. Apparently, there is no native option for sending contact or vCard data in the OS at all[1]. How is my phone able to do so? It’s all down to the HTC Sense user interface skin. Android skins do more than just change the way icons look and offer fancy widgets, they also provide deep interface functions which are sometimes fixes for things Android doesn’t provide.
Who should I shake my fist at more, Android for not having a native contact sharing function or HTC for not realizing people might want to share contacts via their Gmail accounts? I’m inclined to be a little angrier at HTC.
That’s because I also happen to have a Samsung phone. I don’t use it as a phone, only as a MID/PDA. It connects to Wi-Fi just fine, so I could send my contact info from that device. I checked, and lo Samsung’s TouchWiz UI does realize that users might want to send via Gmail and offers that option. My problem is solved.
That doesn’t solve the overall issue though, does it? It also doesn’t help if I’m not near a free Wi-Fi signal. And my HTC phone is my main device; I want to be able to share from there. That’s when I started to look for alternatives.
I’ll share what I found so far in another post. Right now I’d like to know: how do you share digital contact information from your phone? Is it easier on iOS or webOS? Have you found the perfect app for the purpose? Let me know in the comments.
Notes
- This is what I gleaned via research and appears to be true at least up until Android 2.2. Some forum threads suggest that this function is available in Gingerbread (2.3), but I have not had a chance to check this myself. [↩]
Liz Henry has excellent suggestions for the conference. Though I admit that I haven’t yet found a good solution for contact sharing. Bump seems okay, but required more rigamarole to set up than I’d like thanks to the way contacts work on HTC phones. Same with using Barcode Scanner to create a QR code.
I had better luck with my Epic 4G — the contacts program there will send the vCard via GMail, which is all I want. Makes it easy to share my info with folks. But the way Android is constantly trying to link up contacts and combine multiples is driving me insane….
Anyway, who else is going to BlogHer?
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From an excellent cartoon essay “Why I love and hate having a smartphone” on The Oatmeal.
This is my favorite thing about phones right now. Talking about the type of phone you have can lead to fisticuffs!
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I’ve typed some variation of this sentence dozens of times over the past few hours, yet typing it again still feels very odd: Today is my last day at Laptop Magazine. Yep, I’m leaving my post as News Editor after almost exactly two years in that position. No, I am not going to This Is My Next like all the other cool kids.
I’ll be writing for Notebooks.com/GottabeMobile as well as Android Central and some other media outlets as the opportunity arises. Still covering the same stuff: mobile technology, accessories, apps, all that. Not going far, really. I’m really excited about these new opportunities and can’t wait to get to know the communities around these sites even better.
Moving on from Laptop wasn’t an easy decision. Over the past 3+ years I’ve had the chance to meet and work with some wonderful people. And I’ve learned so much about writing and what it means to be a journalist from my editors and fellow writers.
When I started there back in 2008 I thought I had the best job in the world: creating and producing web content all day? Blogging for a living? Getting to try out every new laptop, phone, and other mobile gadget that came through the office? Sweet! What I didn’t realize at the time was that I would get the chance to do so much more, with constant encouragement from everyone around me. I will forever be grateful to the folks at Laptop for giving me the opportunity to grow, particularly Editor in Chief Mark Spoonauer and Online Editorial Director Avram Piltch. Thanks for all the fish :)
Today I turn in my final review and write my last blog post. Tonight I party with my friends. Tomorrow I sleep in. Next week I move on to the next big thing. See you there.
As you may have seen if you’re following my Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr, I’m doing a regular column for Book Country now. (By the way, Book Country is an excellent hangout for genre writers. Not just SF/F, but mystery, romance, etc. Get critiques, get writing advice, meet new people, it’s pretty awesome.) The column will focus on tech for writers and how to find the best tools so you can just focus on achieving wordcount.
One of the topics I plan to cover in the near future is good gadgets for writers. Not laptops — those get their own posts — but the other pieces of tech we find useful. For instance, I have a LiveScribe Echo Smartpen, a fabulous pen device that records what I write and digitizes it. It can also record audio while you write and sync it up with what you were writing at the time.
I find it very useful for crit sessions. I don’t have to write down everything a person said, but I can jot down a one or two word note, click it later, and hear their exact words on why my characterization felt flat. It’s also useful for journalists and students (for obvious reasons). One day I’ll write a full review.
So far I’ve got a short list of my favorite gadgets, but I wanted to throw the question out to my fiction writing friends. Are there any gadgets or pieces of tech that you’ve found helpful to have as a writer beyond your computer or cell phone? Things that either help you when writing or researching or even keeping your sanity when dealing with the business end of writing (taxes, promotion). Tell me about them in the comments. Don’t forget to tell me why you find them useful to you.
‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is open to participation. If you want to install a dead drop in your city/neighborhood follow the ‘how to’ instructions and submit the location and pictures.
I love this idea. I have about 30 USB drives without a purpose. This seems like a good one to me.
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“I had one good pickup line, and e-readers ruined it. I can no longer hit on a handsome man on a long commute by asking about his book — because I can’t see it.”
-- Lisa Lewis, writing in the NYTimes’ City Room blog on how e-readers make it harder for her to strike up conversations with strangers. - Matt (via cnnmoneytech)
Is it wrong of me to think: "Quit harassing strangers, woman, and mind your own business!"? It’s probably wrong of me…
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A user of Google+ was logged into Google with both individual and his company’s Google Apps login, and discovered that Google+ can be used — at least partially — with Google Apps:
As reported by Google Operating System, Google’s John Costigan confirmed this: “We’re actively working on making Profiles (and Google+) available for Google Apps - it should be available in the coming months.”
Personally, I feel that this is where the tools that Google+ offers may be of greatest utility, as a stream-based business collaboration tool, an example of what I call work media. As I recently wondered, the effort involved in defining circles might not be worth the effort. However, if you are working in a company of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people, creating circles for projects, departments, or topically-oriented collections of people makes a lot of sense.
Note also that Google Apps already has an app store architecture, so the rollout of apps like Huddle and Hangouts would be simple.
And there is the opportunity to convert the over 25M Google Apps users to something worth paying for.
This is an excellent idea. I do think workflow could be improved by Google+ for Apps accounts. Especially for long email conversation chains. Too bad my magazine is no longer using Google Apps.
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Demarcating Days
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