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This isn’t quite the minimalist’s mobile office, I could do without a few things but the goal was to travel light. Working full time, and being a student as well as keeping up with things on the go can require a lot of crap. Carrying a 15 inch laptop and a few text books around everyday gets old so I invested in the netbook phenomena.

The Netbook

I wanted to get something that offered a little but more build quality than some of the Acer/MSI machines that I saw at the local electronics store so I did some research and came up with the HP mini 2140. Like most netbooks it sports the 1.6ghz Atom processor and chipset. I ordered mine with 1gb of memory, the 160 HD, the HD Screen (1366×768) and 6-cell battery. This preconfigured model runs around $480 but your shipping and sales tax will probably add another $50 or so.

The screen is very bright and clear, and unlike some netbook screens where the resolution is 1024×600 or 1024×576, the high-res screen doesn’t cut back on any typical viewing problems. It is a glassy screen but it is also capable of being VERY bright so my outdoor useage hasn’t been incredibly hampered. While I like high-res screens some people might find the text to be too small. It does cut down to 800×600 without too much distortion if you find that 1366×768 is too much for you while still offering more horizontal resolution than it’s HP counterpart, the Mini 1000.
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Twidroid: If you’re a twitter’er and you’re in love with your T-Mobile G1, there is no better Twitter Application than Twidroid. Although the name might take a little tongue twisting to get out the program rocks. It allows you to upload geo-tagged photos and customize how frequently you want to check for updates, or even on demand. This is actually crucial because the G1 isn’t exactly what you would call long on battery life.

The Weather Channel: Waiting for summer is brutal. The Weather Channel app lets you check weather in multiple locations so, since it’s 30 degrees and snowing here, I can at least pretend I’m in Hawaii. The application also loads radar maps so you can prepare for the snow and rain. A frequent worry if you’re in Ohio this time of year.

SnapPhoto: The G1 camera is…. horrid. If it isn’t a bright sunny day, it usually isn’t worth trying to take a picture, until SnapPhoto. SnapPhoto offers a plethora of customization and filters. The biggest helper for non-fuzzy photo taking is the stabilization feature. It uses the G1’s accelerometer to judge when the most stable time to take the picture is.

GPS Status: Nothings more frustrating than watching the GPS satellite icon blink… and blink… and blink. THe GPS Status program shows you how many satellites you’re connected to, the speed you’re moving, latitude and longitude and more. Quite a handy application.

Shop Savvy: We’ve all been there, tempted to buy this or that but wondering if you could get it somewhere else cheaper. Shop Savvy lets you scan items using the camera and bar code, searches local stores and the web for the product and even gives you reviews. Never over pay again. The only catch is that most smaller products aren’t really in there.

For as long as I can remember I was told to design for 800×600 resolution monitors. As time went on it generally seemed to move up to 1024×768. Now two things have come a long that could make change back to good old 800×600: Netbooks and Smartphones. Smartphones have come along way, now with phones like the Apple iPhone and T-Mobile G1 there is full Internet browsing but with smaller resolutions than even 800×600. Netbooks have been extremely popular lately but also focus on small resolutions like 1024×600. With screens sticking around the 9-10″ range they aren’t exactly easy reading. The key point with both these devices is that they are supposed to be mobile. Why is that a big point? Because of navigation. Users don’t want to have to pan significantly to have to read even a small amount of text. Although it is a lot easier with touchscreen devices, trackpad navigation has never been ergonomic. It’s just clumsy.

Fine, you think, we have mobile sites that fit this problem. You’d be right, but there is a catch to that as well. Consider the rapid development of both netbooks and smartphones. Where will these devices been in 6 months? A year? It’s not inconceivable that both will see a moderate gain in resolution putting them much closer to their larger counterparts. Which begs the question, with a line so blurred, why maintain two sites? Start shrinking larger web pages a bit and just maintain one. In other words, go back to 800×600.

Nobody thinks Porsche’s are cheap. By and large to most people in this economy, they aren’t. What Porsche has been fighting is the notion that they are unimaginably so expensive. A notion that might be over emphasized by the fact that most of the 911 models come in over $90,000.

But what Porsche did was target mobile phone users, typically young and tech savvy users with ads on Weather.com and various Yahoo sites. The result? 22% of Porsches ad generated traffic was from mobile ads.

At least in terms of metrics it was a success.Where the metrics show is in the click-through rate. It averaged 6 times higher than Porsche’s non-mobile efforts. Personally, generating significant click through rates for ANY mobile campaign is grounds for celebration.

What do the mobile results mean though?
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