Internetling

It’s been said that FireFox Mobile is due in late 2008. A great surprise, because the Minimo browser really got whooped by Opera Mini and its innovations, even on smaller mobile devices, such as older mobile phones. Besides, I hate Minimo.

The UI design mock-up already exists, for touch-screens. Now this looks like old news, but you have probably noticed that since October 2007 not much has happened: there is a chance for FireFox to win Opera Mini users over to its side. The community will enable you to customize the browser, and we’ll be seeing some speed tweaks, hopefully.

I’m just saying: if Deepfish goes cellular, we’re in for a war. Did you know that Nokia’s S60 browser, which is described by users as whoop-ass, is also open source?

Last but not least, I would like to thank God for not having a war between a crappy browser with 90% percent of market share, but rather between very good browsers, all with their own pros and cons.

Let me introduce you to the greatest clone ever. The Everex Cloudbook, while totally ripping off Asus’ idea, is on the other side cursed by the Hackintosh curse. Even the bloody Everex site seems to have an Apple font on the front which doesn’t work on my Debian box. Come on!

Back to basics: The Cloud(hm…Mac)Book is supposed to have more power than the poor old Asus Eee. I don’t know why it runs so slow. Is it the operating system? Because according to this review and another one at Youtube, it needs at least two minutes to boot! The Eee team has done a far better job at tweaking their laptop. I never saw Ubuntu (gOS is a modified Ubuntu Linux OS) run so slow. Maybe because of all the Apple tweaks (you can see an Awn-like Dock in the video, not sure if it’s the default desktop, but looks like it is.). I still don’t know why they used Ubuntu. And where’s the purpose in putting a Meebo or Wikipedia icon on the desktop and NOT running it in FireFox, but a retarded browser(according to teh Linux Action Show)? It’s as if I stored my favorites on my Desktop. No wait, that’s better.

Any thoughts on this, guys?

You don’t have a lot of time. On the operating system market, there are lots of great products, like Linux. With Linux, you can easily customize the look and feel of your system, tweak every aspect of the desktop to your specific needs. What many people forget to tell you is that this can take hours of work.

So how will you get your favorite daily comics to show up on your grandmother’s old ThinkPad?

If you have a passable Internet connection, there are ways of keeping everything on a server, instead of on your computer. Besides this, there is a growing range of web services, apps and sites available, which allow you to manage your daily lightweight computing and entertainment. Data security is an issue, although if you’re really worried about your documents, you can easily host some web apps on your own.

Web Operating Systems

Why not? Your tasks are performed mainly by the server your Web OS is on. In most cases you get a full desktop which you can tweak to your hearts desire, a basic office suite, and other everyday apps, like mail readers, FTP clients and other useful software. But the best part is, your fully customized desktop is available anywhere, anytime, in any (mainstream) browser, at its web address. I’ll name a few of my personal favorites: EyeOS (it got a Yahoo! tech award just recently, congrats!), Cloudo (still in alpha) and G.ho.st (3 gigs of space).

Of course, as always, Mashable compiled a mammoth list of +46. This guy scares me with his lists.

Mashups or customized jumping-off pages

More famous bloggers put these sites into the same category as Web operating systems, but I disagree, you will se why. Netvibes is one of the best data personalized data sites out there. There’s also iGoogle and Pageflakes. I use Netvibes, though (least kludgy). With an account at sites like these you can create a mashup of all the data you need to start and organize your day. Be it a simple Gmail checker, RSS feed, or a full-fledged to-do list, calendar, calculator, the possibilities are limitless. The community also creates its own widgets, and there are already thousands in the directory to choose from. So, while you don’t get a desktop, you can, theoretically, get a similar functionality.

Online apps

Zoho Office, Google Docs, Buzzword, Conceptshare, ThinkFree Office: all attempt to replace the software you are using now on your desktop. While they may not have all the features you notice in your full Microsoft Office 13, most people don’t even need them and a simple app like Google Docs can satisfy your word-processing hunger. At least the gOS team thinks so…

So there you have it. Even though there are other ways to synchronize your desktop software, you will always have a big advantage if you manage to keep them on the Internet and in your browser window.

And now a question for the readers:

Do you use any of these services? Why?

I’m writing this post on my Macbook in a hotel, using a 30 min WLAN coupon. Luckily, I stored all of my crucial sites I must have access to immediately as I log on, at Nevibes. It’s very simple stuff, everyone can do it. Of course, those using Firefox are always ahead, although Opera enables you to synchronize your browser.

Here are some tools which help you manage and store your online bookmarks:

Delicious

Opera 9.50b

Foxmarks (for FF of course)

Do you still keep your bookmarks the old way?

Most of my readers probably know I’m not very fond of Microsoft. Although, sometimes, an extremely rare thing happens: it’s when the talented people working at Microsoft actually get a chance to create something cool. In this small patch of cool between all the other Microsoft un-coolness is also the idea of making Microsoft Office more Web-capable.

Office 14, the next Desktop Office Suite (coming first half of ’09), will feature more online power than the previous versions, which had the online capabilities of a dead frog with a 28.8k modem duct-taped to it.

Of course, Office Live Workspace already provided basic collaboration and synchronization for Word, Excel and PowerPoint (I wonder why people still use this piece of fecal matter for presentations), and there’s always Groove, but we still don’t have that for Access and other additional programs. So Gates said that this is about to change in Office 14.

Hooray for those still struggling with Windows, I guess.

InfoPath Services and Groove Services are fine, sure, but who has time to setup a server?

What I’m trying to say here is not that Microsoft should become Google Docs, but that there are easier ways to do it, for people who do not have the money and/or time for investing into servers. That’s what Google does right.