Friday, July 27, 2012

Me and My Mini

I'm in Chicago for a family reunion. We got here last night and it was 93 degrees at midnight and that was a relief from the over one hundred temperature it had been that day. Thanks heavens it is cooling off a bit. It's only a few days for me, but the people here have been suffering with very high temperatures all summer.

I just brought along what I call my mini. I think the correct title is notebook computer. It is small and easy to carry around. It's gadget overload here. There are BlackBerries for all of us, laptops, and tablets. All of them need to be plugged in. The mini has a much longer battery life, so it isn't fighting for plug in time.

Up until now I have always taken my lapptop, too, because I couldn't use the mini for writing because it had no word processing program and no disc drive so I could put one in. Thankfully, my son remembered we'd bought a portable disc drive. Suddenly I could install WordPerfect on the tiny computer.

I don't think I'd like to write a whole manuscript on the mini or read one, but for a short trip where I'm just doing a little work, it's great.

My son keeps trying to get me to get a tablet, but it seems like one more thing to carry instead of replacing something I can't see myself writing much on a touch screen keyboard. The great thing about the mini is that it is small, but has a real keyboard. I can go online, and read and write emails. And now I can actually write on it.

Am I missing something beyond the cute factor of computer tablets?

5 comments:

Planner said...

I can just picture all the hungry gadgets in your apartment begging for juice! I'll bet you can't imagine traveling sans gadgets. How our world has changed!

Like you, I have been wondering what I'm missing by not owning a tablet computer. I suspect there are some cool "apps" but I haven't entered that world yet. If you figure out why the world seems to have embraced tablet computers as a necessity, please let us know!

Betty Hechtman said...

It's lucky I don't have a tablet now or there wouldn't be enough outlets to plug everything in. We've already tripped one circuit breaker. Nothing like going down in the basement in the middle of the night looking for your circuit breaker.

Linda O. Johnston said...

You've expressed some of my concerns about those cute and handy small portable gadgets, Betty. They're easy to take anywhere--but are they really helpful to writers? I'm not sure.

Betty Hechtman said...

Linda, I do like the mini. It is light weight which makes it nice for travel and has a keyboard. I have a Blackberry, but I don't type well with my thumbs.

Ellen said...

Minis and Pocket PCs are not for writing. But I've found they're grand for proofreading. (A spell-check can only do so much. Then you have to get in there and make sure the correctly-spelled word is the right word. You don't need a hard drive for that, as long as you can use SD cards.