Tablet or netbook?

[Red Light]

Really? Good lord. It's a basic function of a computer. Even my blackberry has that.

Not natively or with anything Apple offer you. You can jailbreak it but then who want's to have to hack into their iPad just to get basic functions on it?

 

[AbelianGrape]

An iPad is great for casual web browsing and email, maybe a little online TV. It switches on in an instant, which makes it very handy for looking things up on the spur of the moment. It's a decent ereader, one of the best available if you need to read PDF documents in their original layout. As you say, it isn't much use as a storage device - you're supposed to use online services for that. In meetings an iPad is just about usable; it's certainly less obtrusive than a laptop. It isn't great for typing more than a few notes, since the keyboard takes up half the screen. You can add a wireless keyboard, but by then you might as well be carrying a netbook. There are as yet no decent apps for editing Office documents.

Rumour has it that there's an iPad 3 due shortly, so it might be worth holding your fire for a month or two.

If you're buying NAS, consider buying one with two drives that can be mirrored, so if one fails you still have a chance of saving your data. Annual failure rates for home-grade drives are normally 1-2%, and I don't imagine they've been improved by the floods in the Thai disk factories.

Also, consider using an online backup service such as Carbonite or Mozy for your PCs. They are relatively cheap for the sort of data volumes you're talking about, and automated.

 

[srw]

We've tried using an online backup service - Virgin media's own. But the broadband upload speed is so sloooowwwww that we gave up PDQ.

Frankly, given I've got two locations to play with (and, arguably, at least three more in the shape of the places where we each work) why would I want online storage?

 

[SavageHoutkop]

Remind me again what happened to the Samsung tablet - is it now not up for sale in the EU or was it just Germany (or was it the phone only??). My memory fails me with all these lawsuits.

 

[GrumpyGregry]

Dropbox for files you use. Carbonite for backup.

The value of cloud storage is its accessibility from a wide range of internet connected devices anywhere on earth.

 

[Norm]

Remind me again what happened to the Samsung tablet - is it now not up for sale in the EU or was it just Germany (or was it the phone only??). My memory fails me with all these lawsuits.

It's still happening but, IIRC, Germany was the only significant European country which had sales suspended. The battles between Apple and Samsung are continuing around the world.

I originally thought that Samsung would struggle with their prices the same as the iPad but, having used both OSs and having had a chance to get my hands on both, I would get the Galaxy tab.

 

[marinyork]

We've tried using an online backup service - Virgin media's own. But the broadband upload speed is so sloooowwwww that we gave up PDQ.

Famously slow as a ratio of upstream to downstream. However, 100Mbs should be available in your area if you haven't got it already (to go to 120Mbs). 10Mbs upload there. Not that that'll solve your problems, just saying like if you didn't have it already and were thus inclined.

 

[AbelianGrape]

Yes, it takes ages to do the initial full backup, but you don't have to sit and watch it. The main advantage is ease of use - you choose the folders you want to be backed up and let the software get on with it. If you have the NAS at one of your other sites and will be organised enough to copy the data regularly, that's fine too. It will be more flexible that way and you can do the initial copy over the local network. You will need to carry the data storage back home from time to time if your data changes faster than your uplink can handle, though.

I backup data both ways, for much the same reason I carry two spare inner tubes.

 

[Red Light]

Dropbox for files you use. Carbonite for backup.

The value of cloud storage is its accessibility from a wide range of internet connected devices anywhere on earth.

And its problem for storage and particularly backup is the time it will take you to download a restore. It can take days or more. You also need to be cognisant of the restrictions of the Data Protection Act which makes storing virtually any business related information on the Cloud illegal unless your Cloud provider will contract to store it only on servers in the EU. Most Cloud services are unable or unwilling to do that

 

[martint235]

I'm rather a fan of my Lenovo Thinkpad Edge Netbook. Such a fan they have just become (as in I've made them) the standard for our mobile staff. Bit slow to boot up but once running it is as good as any other mainstream Windows 7 PC.

The fashionista style marketing driven obsolescence of Apple kit appals me.

Sorry to be a bit pedantic but I wouldn't class the Edge series as a Netbook. They are fully fledged, fully equipped notebooks/laptops. The idea of a netbook is that they carry a minimum spec, are cheap and were mainly used for browsing and such.