Monday, October 13, 2008

A Netbook for Your iPhone?

ITWire ran an interesting story that spotlights a new take on the netbook that may hit the market soon. Unlike most netbooks that are powered by either Linux or Windows XP, this netbook is powered by an iPhone.

What can only be described as the Palm Foleo 2.0, but for iPhones and not Treos, this interesting OLO device is rumored to use the OS of the iPhone to enable a more productive, notebook-friendly experience associated with Web browsing and day-to-day data entry in applications ranging from blog posts, online docs, email, and notes.

With OLO, the iPhone not only provides the OS, but also serves as the device’s trackpad.

While the Palm Foleo never made it to the market, I hailed it as a trendsetting device that would inevitbly force the migration and evolution of the phone becoming the central hub for all of our mobile communications and computing needs. It suffered from the right idea, but the wrong engineering and execution.

With the mass proliferation and enthusiasm of iPhones and their owners, the OLO may pave the way for a more successful venture in placing the phone at the center of everything.

Time will tell however, as will the specs and details of the OLO iPholeo (not the real name) when they’re available.

I am intrigued.

Top 3 iPhone 3G Applications

Calendar


With the latest 2.1 firmware, the iPhone Calendar is now a mature application. Now you can have all your Mac calendars synced, or you can choose from within iTunes which ones do you want only on your iPhone. You can see events from all calendars if you want, or you can chose only one calendar to focus on. I started to use iPhone Calendar for much more than simple events or reminders. For instance, the second event you see in the screenshot above is in fact an exercise for my personal mission statement. After working several days on my personal mission statement I thought it would be interesting to put a daily reminder early in the morning that will list that personal mission. I’ve been doing this for two weeks now and the results are very interesting. But I plan to write more about this way of using tools in a larger post about the Law Of Attraction.

Notes


Surprisingly rising up, Notes is one of the easiest way for me to capture ideas. I use it whenever I don’t have my computer around, because of it’s interface simplicity. Also because of the “email this note” capability, which I found it extremely rare across other similar applications. What you can see in the screenshot above is a typical idea brainstorming. These are barely scaffolds for my posts, or for things I want to do. Usually, a scaffold like this is totally transformed in 6-7 or even more iterations. Some of the ideas are just going to thrash, but most of them are integrated into my daily work routine.

Mail

Widely recognized at the most important improvement in the 2.x firmware series, Mail is finally a very robust tool for online communication. I can use it for PUSH email, like the yahoo mail, for POP accounts, like the one on the mirabilis.ro domain, and for IMAP like Gmail. There is another extremely important improvement in the latest iPhone Mail App and that is the ability to select multiple messages for deletion. I get easily over 100 messages / day and deleting them one by one is more than I can accept, in terms of email management. Also, viewing attachments is so much easier now. Really an asset.