The battle to find new ways to connect to the web while on the move is warming up intriguingly.
Laptops are ideal, but weighty to lug around. A smartphone with basic PC business functions is pocketable and indispensable for anyone who works, but still a compromise if you ned to produce documents. A netbook? Lighter and smaller, but even the best are pretty slow. iPad? Well, yes, they are an entertainment product, but a lot of people use them for business trips and leave their laptops in their soon-to-be permanenet home, the desk.
The iPad’s screen is a comfortable size, it has 10 hours or more of battery life, and you can type on it, either with the onscreen keyboard or an optional add-on. It is a shame there is no Microsoft Office for iPad, though.
There are also a few wannabeiPads when it came out in the summer.
But this menagerie of portable ways of being online is not the end of the matter. Toshiba, one of the oldest and best laptop artistes, if a bit on the boring side, has also been doing some re-imagining, as Apple execs refer to thinking.
The mighty Tosh’s newest products are nove. The Toshiba AC100 is an ultra-slim, ultra-light netbook with a 10.1 inch screen and full0size keyboard, with runs Google Android rather than Windows, so is, in effect, a giant mobile phone. The result is faster and lighter than many others.