Where are the real netbooks? 本物のネットブックって、どこだ？

I stopped by the Yodobashi Camera store in Umeda today. I just needed a plug to fix the rice cooker. It was a waste of time, no better selection than Kojima, and it just takes a lot of time to get in and out.

Took longer because I checked out the current version of Sharp's Netwalker. Nice. Found a Toshiba Android Dynabook while I was looking, and it looked sweet, too. But, according to the salesman, neither has drivers to hook a cell phone modem to them, so phone activities are limited to Skype via wifi.

Not that I would pull down lots of web pages via a cell modem. I just want to be able to send e-mail from school without wearing my thumb out on my cell-phone's keypad.

Didn't actually ask about Skype on the Android Dynabook. The salesman was telling me, "Of course you can't get on the phone network with these." like it was the only sensible answer: "Oh. You really want an iPad!"

And I just gave up talking to him at that point.



Yeah, the iPad is a sweet machine, too.

Except.

I don't have money to buy a new Mac, and I'm counter-motivated by the processor in the current crop, anyway. And there is no way I'm going to buy an MSWindows box, not until Microsoft is under 50% market share and learning to play by the rules instead of playing the rules.  And the iPad is, by design, a peripheral to the Mac, or, in deference to the insensate market, the MSWindows platform. Most of the iPad function is unavailable from a Linux or BSD class box.

I do have some old PPC Macs, but the OS is old, and even if I updated to the last version to support PPC, 10.5, that's no longer supported by Apple. So, if I were to buy an iPad, I'd have to spend yet another JPY 100,000 minimum to be able to get reasonable value out of it.

Now, if I had that kind of money, I could afford to not work over winter break, and I might be able to hunt around and find a cell modem with a driver I could load for one of these two machines. Then I could buy a USB hub and headset and have a portable phone that I could actually send e-mail with, instead of just txtng.

Oh, the Netwalker would need a separate keyboard, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

So, they are sweet machines.

Light.  Cheap.

Portable.

Linux!

And no use at all when I'm at the school and the wifi is (as it should be until they can tear themselves loose of Microsoft) locked down and off-limits to the teachers' own PCs. (Bite your tongue, boy!)