I can remember taking a big ole laptop to a Conference in the mid 90's and getting the strangest looks when I hauled it out to type in some notes. In 2000, I remember bringing my Motorola PageWriter and using it to effectively IM others from my company during sessions. A few years later, I recall seeing early Windows Mobile devices starting to be used at conference, then the ubiquitous Blackberry, and now laptops. I would expect the trend over the next year to be Blackberries, Android-powered mobile phones (social networking devices) and netbooks, with netbooks quickly eclipsing standard laptops for road warriors. You should start to see large numbers of netbooks being offered by cellular carriers this fall for incredibly low prices (think $99 - $199 for the device with a contract and data plan). Once people can flip open a full touch-typable keyboard with decent cellular connectivity (3G / 4G) and a readable screen, no one will be hauling laptops
 around when they travel. (That said, I'm sick of the Dell "Lollipop" commercials for their netbooks and on those grounds alone, wouldn't buy the darn things.)

The critical issue for netbooks will be battery life. If they can begin to match smartphones in battery life (plus a bit more for actually surfing or general computing use during a typical day's use), they will take off. It will not surprise me to see someone take a phone call on their netbook in the next couple months (yes, using a Bluetooth headset). "Excuse me, but I think your netbook is ringing." Another critical factor will be durability. Most cell phones can handle the periodic fumble to a concrete floor. Laptops generally can't. Netbooks will need to develop that durability and I would expect many of them to start to be roughly the form factor of a thin Franklin Planner. If you're comfortable hauling one of those around, you'll find it easy to transition to a netbook.

The implications for us as records managers don't change a whole lot, but it does change the dynamic for data protection. Netbooks will likely drive greater movement to cloud computing because netbooks don't require wi-fi for connectivity (in other words, if the availability of cellular signals is theoretically higher than the availability of wi-fi, therefore people will be able to connect virtually anywhere and they will prefer a direct connection to the cloud, rather than dealing with VPN connections). As long as you have a good 3G signal, you have a reasonably high speed connection to the Internet. The good news is that you won't have to store as much information on the local hard drive; the bad news is that you will need to seriously look at how your protect the netbook from being used by an unauthorized party to gain access to your internal network if the netbook is lost or stolen while running. I would expect to see more biometric protection being
 used to activate or awaken netbooks.


 Patrick Cunningham, CRM
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"Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier." 
-- Colin Powell 

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