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(my netbook looks just like hers)

Three months ago I got my first real netbook - A Lenovo S10 with Splashtop. I blogged about it here and tried to share some pointers about how I was using Splashtop. Well, three months have gone by and that Lenovo has become my best friend. I don't know about you but I'm constantly place-shifting. I go to the office in Cupertino, I work out of my house in Santa Cruz and work in just about every coffee shop in-between. I travel a bit here and there and when I've had to much coffee you can find me sitting in my car right outside the local Starbucks "borrowing" some wifi. It's amazing what the right netbook with Splashtop has done for me.

What do you do on your netbook?

Like I mentioned earlier, I'm a rambling man - I don't like to sit still. I'm in a lot of coffee shops. Whenever I see a netbook (which is every day lately) I ask people, "what do you do on your netbook?" This has been a fairly informal poll - I'm no scientist but I've probably talked to close to 50 men and women, mostly in Northern California about their netbook usage. Again, I'm not claiming that this is the right target demographic for a study but these Valley-types tend to be early adopters and technically proficient. Without exception every individual I've talked to with a netbook is using primarily their web browser. You're thinking that this is obvious, right? I mean, we are all primarily using our web browser for most things?

Clearly this is true - but if you dig a little deeply you'll find out that this is all people use on their netbooks. They *might* use Skype in addition but they are emailing, watching video, facebooking, tweeting, reading news, chatting and studying all through their web browser. On our normal computers we might spend a lot of time in the browser but we'll have a whole host of other applications open. Netbook users seem quite content just using their browser.

I'm in the same boat. I can blog, email, chat, tweet - do everything I want through my browser. I don't have any other applications open because I don't need anything else. To be honest, I have another OS (that shall remain nameless) on my Lenovo. I haven't started that OS in over a month. I just don't need it. Splashtop gets me online instantly, doesn't waste a ton of battery when I'm not using the S10 (instant off) and works ridiculously fast. It doesn't have all the overhead of a full-blown OS. It starts faster from a cold boot than the other OS does out of sleep or hibernate.

The Lenovo S10 was the first device with Splashtop that I could buy in the US that matched my needs. I pledged 3 months ago that I would start using it every day. The more I use it, the more confident I am that the simplicity of Splashtop will appeal strongly to computer users. More than that, even, I find it an essential element of any netbook.

See you in a coffee shop soon.