Café computing: iPads, Atrix Lapdocks, Chromebooks, and MacBook Airs

Last Saturday at my favorite café in San Francisco, Martha & Bros., I did a double-take when I saw what appeared to be a prototype Chrome OS laptop — aka a Chromebook — in use by a young woman at one of the tables. I’m accustomed to seeing regular laptops, iPhones, BlackBerrys, and Android smartphones at this and other coffee houses, as well as increasingly iPads, but certainly not Chromebooks, which were made available only to beta testers in late December.

I went over and asked her if it was indeed a Chromebook (it was) and why she was using it instead of some other device at the café. She said that the Chromebook was perfect to surf the Web and do email and other social networking via its browser, which is pretty much the only mechanism available to such activities on Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS. The Chromebook is much lighter than a laptop, and its screen is a larger, more readable size than a netbook’s screen. Battery life also is decent; four to five hours is quite possible for the diskless device.

The idea of a Chromebook or another lightweight device — such as an iPad, Android tablet, or smartphone docked into a dumb laptop such as the Motorola Atrix/Lapdock combo — as a casual “café computer” makes a lot of sense. Their batteries last fairly long (the iPad can go 10 hours, more than anything else I’ve tried), and their keyboards and screens are sized well for real surfing and communicating. You don’t get the clutched-fingers syndrome as you do from using a smartphone’s keyboard for any length of time.

But does the idea of a café computer make sense? Maybe it’s one of those techno-urban indulgences favored by latte-sipping geeks in places like Silicon Valley, San Francisco, West L.A., New York’s Manhattan, Boston’s Back Bay, D.C.’s Northwest, and techie-friendly islands within Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Austin, and the two Portlands — but unlikely to catch on in the rest of America.

At the risk of sounding like an insular latte liberal rather than someone who’d prefer to be at a tea party, I think the idea makes a lot of sense for a lot of people.

iPads and other laptop replacements everywhere Certainly, when I fly these days, I see about as many iPads and now occasionally a Motorola Xoom here and there as I do MacBooks and PC laptops. The tablets have the advantage of actually fitting on the tray table, and if the person in front of you oh so rudely lowers his or her seatback, you can still see the screen — just try that with a laptop. Plus, an iPad will easily run for an entire cross-country flight, as well as during your wait to board the plane and your transit time to and from the airports. An Atrix/Lapdock duo, a Xoom, or a Chromebook will usually last at least the flight time.

I also see iPads increasingly at tech conferences, fast replacing laptops as the note-taking and diversion device of choice. Even CIOs, not known for embracing the latest gear or Apple products in their professional lives, now often have one at the ready. Outside of tech, friends report seeing them increasingly at conferences; they’re no longer novelties, even if they’re not as common as in the tech industry’s get-togethers.

In my professional work, it’s clear that reporters have quickly adopted them rapidly. At Google’s announcement of Chrome OS last December, the room was evenly split between journalists filing their stories on iPads and those working on laptops. A PR colleague told me that a recent media event was chock-full of reporters taking notes and filing stories via iPads, a real change from six months earlier when it was all laptops.

When I covered the recent announcement of the iPad 2, I used the Atrix/Lapdock duo for the live reporting, as I never quite trust my older work MacBook’s battery, and the theater seating for these events makes using a laptop really uncomfortable anyhow. I could have used my iPad, but the Atrix/Lapdock has the advantage of running desktop Firefox, which works better with InfoWorld’s Internet-based Drupal content management system than the iPad’s mobile Safari does. I could also have used the Chomebook, but my test unit’s trackpad is unreliable, so it’s unsuited for live work. (It is a beta, after all!)

How much can you rely on café computers for “real” work? Which raises the fit issue: These devices work really well for Web access, email, and other communication tools, and the iPad has some truly amazing office apps that you can use on the road to edit docments or create slideshows. However, they can only go so far. For café computing, any of these devices is perfectly fine.

For extended use over one to three days, I find the iPad is the only device I can rely on for doing my routine work. The issues the mobile browsers have with supporting the contenteditable HTML feature and the related TinyMCE Web editor mean it’s twice as much work to edit and write stories for InfoWorld on it. However, the iPad makes up for that in its native apps for email, calendar, contacts, office productivity, and entertainment that I find just aren’t well handled in the cloud-only devices such as the Chromebook and the Atrix/Lapdock duo. (Sorry, Android apps pale in comparison to iOS ones as well.)

Apple and Google need to bring their mobile browsers to equality with their desktop browsers, and Google and other proponents of cloud apps need to start showing the world how to develop good ones. So far, most are pretty limited and clunky — just go to Google’s Chrome Store to see what I mean.

On longer trips, I still bring my iPad or sometimes another device for use throughout the day when I’m on the go. But I leave my MacBook Pro at the hotel so that I have a “real” computer available in the mornings and evenings to do the things I just can’t do on a café computer.

Why not use a superlight laptop like the MacBook Air? Which brings me to the MacBook Air: a laptop that is nearly as thin and light as an iPad (the 11-inch Air version weighs just 50 percent more than an iPad and is not even twice as thick at its thickest point) but brings the horsepower of a midlevel Mac and still offers battery life of four to six hours. Why not make that my sole device instead of going back and forth between a full laptop and café computer?

I was very tempted to do so, believe me, but as a primary computer, it’s not quite what I need. If only the Air had more processing horsepower and larger SSD capacity, for running the full (and slow) Microsoft Office and the full (and decently performing) Adobe Creative Suite. And if only it supported FireWire — all my drives are FireWire because I find that Time Machine backups can really bog down my MacBook’s USB channel, so I needed to keep the drives on their own bus. Maybe the Air’s next version or the one after that will close the performance gap. Also, as a second computer, an Air is too pricey compared to an iPad, Xoom, Chromebook, or Atrix/Lapdock duo. PC makers’ MacBook Air wannabes have similar trade-offs, if you’re a Windows kind of person.

But by the time there’s an Air I could use as my primary computer, I’m hoping that the concurrent generations of iPad, Android tablets, Chromebooks, and dumb-laptop docks for smartphones will have desktop-equivalent browsers, that cloud apps will really be desktop-class, and that the mainstream apps on a PC or Mac will all have capable iOS and even Android equivalents. That way, I get a thinner, lighter computer I can use 80 percent of the time from an iPad or similar device, and need to rely on a shared PC or Mac server for only the occasional heavy-duty loads. I can see homes shifting to have one Mac Mini or equivalent PC running as a server, while tablets and other café computers become each family member’s regular system. Offices could do the same for clusters of employees.

If that future doesn’t arrive in the next few years, I’ll still have my recent-model MacBook Pro for the heavy lifting and my iPad for the airplane, conferences, and café. I just need to be careful not to spill the coffee.

This article, “Café computing: iPads, Atrix Lapdocks, Chromebooks, and MacBook Airs,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.