Most of my day is spent answering emails and making phone calls. I use Outlook for my email and Skype for my phone calls as most the calls are international.
I want to get a new notebook and a smartphone (never had a smartphone before). I’ve never owned an Apple computer before but I’m willing to make the switch.
Email is what I spend most of my time doing, so I need the email clients on the computer and phone to sync without issues.
I’d like to hear people’s opinions, preferably based on personal experience, on what type of set up I should go for.
My current shortlist is:
Laptop (Max budget NT$60K): Apple Mac Book Pro or Lenovo T410.
I currently use an IBM T40 and find the nipple thing that moves the curser around a really nice alternative to a mouse. That’s my sole reason for short listing the IBM.
I’m using an HTC Desire. I have a Lennovo T410 for work and a Toshiba T135 for personal use.
My experience with Lennovo over ~6 years is awful. Before the T410 I had a T60 which never really worked right. I’ve been through 2 HDD crashes and could never really prevent the laptop from overheating after changing out almost every part that touches the motherboard. Been through a couple RAM swaps, too. My company has, I dunno, 4,000 T40s/T60s…what a mess. With that said, the T410 which I’ve only had for 3 months has been reliable, but it weighs twice as much as the Toshiba and I don’t really use the optical drive so it’s a waste of weight.
The sync on the Desire generally works well but occascionally the phone isn’t recognized by the T410 until I reboot the laptop. I don’t sync on the Toshiba often so I can’t entirely say it is the fault of the T410 but I don’t think it has ever failed on the Toshiba.
I don’t use Skype on the T410 but I do on the Toshiba.
[quote=“Gary78”]Email is what I spend most of my time doing, so I need the email clients on the computer and phone to sync without issues.[/quote]Any combination ought to deliver that much without issue. Ought to. pilam99 seems to have issues.
I’m a Mac convert, and that’s my default recommendation. (jashsu hates Apple, and defaults in the other direction)
Macs just work, and viruses are practically a non-issue: which may be a point to consider if you’re downloading a bunch of attachments and don’t have a good anti-virus program running all the time. You’ll likely pay a bit more, and enjoy the experience more.
Do you want to use Skype on your phone, too? If so, get an iPhone. There is a native Skype app for it. Skype on Android outside of Verizon in the States and other specific carriers elsewhere right now is speculative at best. There is no reliable solution that I know of right now in Taiwan for this. There were some solutions before, but these were 3rd party programs that either got blocked outright or don’t work well at all, in the rare occasions they actually work.
Do you want to run MacOS, too? Windows 7 is close, but MacOS is still a better operating system. If so, get a Mac. Otherwise, you can save some coin running another brand of PC. One thing about the MacBook line that has not been done well on any other notebook is the huge glass multi-touch touch-pad. This allows you to make gestures of up to four-fingers, which really speeds up a lot of workflow. Once you start using this touchpad with MacOS for things like Expose (a much better Alt-Tab), Spaces (built in virtual desktops) and Dashboard (a very convenient and fast place to run info and productivity widgets) or even simple things like pinch-zooming and rotating images by spinning your fingers, you will miss these workflows every time you go back to Windows. Also, you can very easily set up the machine with both MacOS and Windows in case you want to use a program that is better in Windows, like Excel.
I am a long time PC-person and use Windows 7 a lot. I also have an Android phone that I still use a lot. But for me the MacBook and iPhone combo works much better for what I do.
Nowadays, you don’t really have to worry about e-mail syncing. Smartphones hook up to e-mail servers directly and thus stay in sync by default.
For the Skype part, the iPhone is your best solution. It’s possible to have Skype running in the background always, so when someone calls you, the phone rings.
For the laptop part, a Mac or PC should work equally well for your needs. As mabagal said, you can sync your contacts with gmail, so that you can update your contacts online and have them immediately sync with the contacts on your iPhone.
I know a lot of Mac users actually use bootcamp to run Windows. Mainly they buy the Mac for the hardware (whether or not Mac hardware is good or not is a whole different can of worms). I spend 60/40 of my time in Vista and Ubuntu. My suggestion to go with the T410 is mainly centered around the fact that the Lenovo hardware is generally regarded as business-quality. Obviously if you need to run OS X then the choice is easy.
As for the smartphone, I’m on record as stating that the iPhone platform and its various peripheral services are an offense against open computing and I stick by that. It’s not the sort of nuanced argument I would use to try to dissuade a teenager from choosing the iPhone over something else like a Desire, but I figure if Gary78 is informed enough to be asking about qualitative differences, then the fact that the Android platform that Desire runs on is a much better power tool. More discussion on this can be found in the various Android-specific threads on the forum.
That is unless you need a discrete graphics card at least.
What email service do you use? Android is great if you use gmail, although it’s not that hard to set up support for POP3 or IMAP, although it doesn’t sync, it’s more of an option to allow you to check your mail on the go. Skype doesn’t support Android, yet, but there are alternative services that offer similar functionality. Skype should come to Android this year though.