I admit it, I have a big one. Sometimes being big is great. All that size is helpful. But sometimes you get made fun of for being big. Like at work, the past two days now. I pulled it out at a meeting and Scott made a comment both times: “Geez, Mike… that’s a big laptop.”

You see I’m of the opinion that you need to either go big or go small. No in between. That’s why I bought the HP Pavilion dv9428nr laptop. I wanted a machine that was still portable, but could act as a desktop replacement. And with a 17″ widescreen, dual core 2.20 GHz, 2GB RAM, I would say that it does the job well. On the other hand when I just need portability and small size, I go to my (now relatively outdated) HP iPAQ 2215 Pocket PC or to my LG Cherry Chocolate. On either one, I can check email wirelessly, surf the Internet, read RSS feeds, read books… They do the job and easily fit in my pockets. You see, I get these devices. They make sense to me.

Then there are the “in between machines”. These are the computers that don’t have a clear identity or place to fit in. For example, take the Asus Eee PC 4G. It’s small, but not too small. It runs Linux or Windows XP. It has a 800×480 monitor. It has USB slots, an SD slot, 802.11g, ethernet, and an external monitor port. It costs between $200 and 400.

It isn’t bad, but it isn’t great. It isn’t too terribly slow, but it definitely isn’t fast. So where does this fit in? What role does it fill? It may fit in my coat pocket during the winter, but it won’t fit in my jeans or shorts in the summer. It could work as a “couch term”, but if I wanted to do some serious programming or watch some quality video… eh, not so much. If that was the case, I’d just go get my laptop. If I wanted to check email in my car or in line at the post office, I’d use my phone or my pocket pc. The Eee PC would be too big. If I wanted to check my email or do some work while on travel or at a conference, I’d pull out my laptop. I wouldn’t need the small size of the Eee PC.

So where do these “in between machines” fit in? I can see buying the Eee PC if I simply can’t afford a powerful laptop. I’m sure there’s a market for that, but how big of a market? However, not all these computers are targeted at those markets. The Samsung Q1 is a small handheld tablet computer meant for video, email, Internet, etc. This is a case where they’re trying to put the desktop in your pocket, but with specs like a 900MHz proc and 512MB RAM, you just aren’t getting that.

This suffers from a lot of the same drawbacks as the Eee PC. Too big for real portability yet too weak for real use. However, this one isn’t quite so cheap. With a price tag of around $1000, you really have to want one to buy one. So I ask again, where do these “in between machines” fit in? Or maybe the better question is…

How big are you?

At first I used RSS Bandit to aggregate my RSS Feeds. It worked fairly well, but I had a few issues with it… mainly the fact that items I read on my desktop would still be unread on my laptop. Trying to keep it synchronized in my head as far as which items I had already read was just too much. It may not sound like a big deal, but if you read say 30 items on your computer, to read another 30 new items on another computer you have to potentially process twice as many items (60 items = 30 old + 30 new). Then if you have a third computer on which you read RSS feeds (say at work), forget about it.

Then I started using the news reader I wrote Vein News. With a proprietary folder structure and some XML, multiple computers could share a data store which would then make read items marked as read on all computers sharing the same data store. This also had the fortunate (and somewhat planned) advantage that any of the computers could update the store which kept it more synchronized than a laptop with on-at-times-off-at-times uptime would have. It had another advantage of still having access to all your feeds if your Internet connection ever goes down (something that online news readers are susceptible to).

I kept my RSS aggregator up to date over the years and had it compiling to a desktop version and a Pocket PC version by simply opening either the dsw or vcw workspaces. The main problems I had with this approach was:

1. I was the one that had to keep it up to date, add new features and fix all bugs. This is both good and bad. It was exactly what I needed it to be, but anything I found that needed to be fixed would stay broken until I found time to fix it. And since time is at a premium these days (even though I still find time in the wee hours of the night to blog)…
2. I still had the problem of keeping the home feed store in sync with the work feed store. That could be fixed with keeping the feed store on a flash drive, but then if the flash drive isn’t plugged in and Vein News wasn’t running, it gets out of sync quickly.

Then a few months ago I decided I would give Google Reader a try. A couple friends of mine use it and I figured it couldn’t be that bad. Then around the same time, I started using the Internet access on my phone. Since I can get to any regular Internet page, I could access my Google Reader feeds too… and everything in is sync. No matter where I read my feeds, whether it’s at work, at home, on my phone, or at my parents’ house, my feed items are always marked appropriately. Also, if the Internet does go down for a few hours or even a few days at my house, I can still read feeds through my phone and vice versa. I am always connected. And that holds true while I’m out and about standing in line at the post office or waiting in the dentist’s office.

The always connectedness and complete synchronization of the feeds with Google Reader is basically everything you (well, everything I) would ever need in a reader. And then with the recent addition of offline mode to Google Reader… I mean come on.

I’ve had my Cherry Chocolate phone for about a year now. So imagine my surprise when I see the design of the new Zune:

So did Microsoft just say “screw it” and do a copy n paste here? This sure wouldn’t be the first time. Then again, I could probably say the same thing about LG: