Sometimes I feel a bit cooped up in my office. Of course it doesn’t help that it is extremely small, I share it one someone else, it contains 7 noisy computers, and it’s about 90 degrees F in there. At any rate occasionally I find that I need a change of scenery. In these cases I find that the combination of a wifi laptop and remote desktop client comes in handy. I can just pickup and move to somewhere else within range.

I had a habit of doing this at my old job as well. Sometimes a change of location is just the ticket to get you un-stuck from a problem our out of a brain slump. I find that I like to do the same thing at home. It’s nice not to be chained to a desktop anymore, thank-you Wifi. It seems that I’m using my laptop more for this ‘roaming’ scenario now, then for anything else. It seems to me that for this a laptop is really overkill. All I really need is a wifi thin client with a keyboard and a big screen – even a CE machine with an Xscale processor would do. Whoa, I just said ‘thin client’. That takes me back to the mid 90’s and Sun’s famous slogan “The network IS the computer”. It all seemed so funny back then and really went no where, but in today’s connected ‘mobile’ world it kinda makes sense somehow. Wireless bandwidth is the key.

With 3G starting to get deployed and wireless broadband ever-expanding, it won’t be long before you should be able to connect back to ‘your stuff’ from nearly anywhere in the civilized world. At that point why do I need to try and sync files, install duplicate software etc. All I need is to just reach back and ‘take control’ of my desktop machine. Now if I could only find super small, light and cheap CE think client laptop with an SXGA screen and killer battery life. Oh and also solve the nasty router, NAT access problems that prevent me from getting back to my home machine.

Rembmeber the Vadem Clio? It's back and seems to have better specs so it might make a reasonable thin client. Unfortunately it's more expense that a cheap laptop:

http://pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=35731&highlight=clio

Too bad this cheap laptop doesn't have built in wireless or decent battery life as a sub $500 notebook running linux would be a nice remote desktop client:

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?product_id=3504708&cat=179113&type=19&dept=3944#long_descr

I found this article on the next era of thin clients. It gives some good history, but I disagree with the idea that a web browser is the only app that is needed for future thin clients.
http://www.theinquirer.net/pocket.aspx?article=20491

"The web browser is the only app needed for thin clients"??? How 1998! This guy obviously hasn't tried to write a serious web app. The only "web" platform that is close is the XUL that Mozilla projects use - but it's at odds with MS. I CAN see applications such as email becoming web apps. The oddpost guys did it with DHTML and Google has something similar but not as sophisticated. Thunderbird could probably be implented within Firefox with XUL. But using a web model for all types of network traffic really isn't the best.

Of course cell providers like web apps because you use lots of bandwith that is currently metered.

BTW, I think I enabled links in comments.

Name:

Captcha:

Comments:

All links will be marked with the nofollow tag, making them useless for search rankings. Any posts containing spam URLs will then be deleted.