Day -3

Well, Monday's done, and only 3 days until I get that shiny little (or, I suppose, flat black little) laptop on my doorstep.

Today I made a decision for my tech needs: I'm selling my iPad. I have a couple of reasons for doing so.

First of all, I own way to many different devices, and I've been trying to figure out the most cost effective way for me to downsize for some time now. Here's the run down of my devices:

HTC Desire on US Cellular (Sadly, in for repair. They gave me a piece of crap samsung acclaim as a loaner)
Apple iPad, 16 gig, wi-fi only
Dell Studio 1458, i7, 500 gig, all the goodies. Plugged into 22 inch monitor. Ubuntu. Hasn't left my desk since I got my iPad
Dell Inspiron e1505, into a 17 inch full screen. Windows 7. Has been custom mounted as a desktop for over a year now, since I got the other laptop. Plugged into my Marantz and plays all the musics, off an internal 250 and external 250 gig hard drives.
HP ... really old desktop. Runs Ubuntu as a headless server, with 500 gigs of storage.

Now that I can add:

Google cr-48

to the mix, I'm realizing that I'm on way to high of an overlap. Since I got the android phone, I've realized that my iPad stays in the bag most of the time, unless I want to read on it. So there's redundancy. In addition, as I've mentioned, I haven't used the Studio 14 as an actual laptop since I got the iPad/graduated College.

I should probably mention that the Dell inspiron e1505 was given to me by friends when I had no computer, and has a problem that makes it unusable as a portable computer. The HP I'm using as a server was given to me by my brother as a project, and I'm using that monitor for the e1505. The iPad was given to me when I graduated college as sort of bribe to the seniors to be happy. The Studio 14 was originally purchased as the Dell Studio XPS 13, but it had a whole series of problems that ended in it getting replaced and 'upgraded' to a more powerful, but heavier and less cool machine. I bought it for myself post-e1505 problems and pre-iPad, and had to work my tail off to pay for it. The HTC Desire was just bought 2 months ago, so that I could give my girlfriend the iPod touch I used to have.

Back to the story.

Unfortunately, I'm going back to school for my masters in the spring, and the iPad is too little for class, and the laptop has become strangely heavy since using the iPad regularly. I was kinda stuck on trying to figure out what to do. I've played with the idea of getting the bluetooth keyboard for the iPad and trying to make that work for class note taking, but I wasn't looking forward to it. I like the full computer experience of multitasking (real multitasking, not iOS multitasking) for school, so that I can have multiple documents and sources and calenders and all that in view. I also played with the idea of selling this laptop and getting something smaller, but this thing is a beast with the i7. I like the power, but I can't afford a power desktop and small laptop in addition to the iPad.

Now, the problem is more or less solved. The CR-48 will take over portable-coffee house stuff, not to mention being my primary computer for the testing stuff. I'll sell the iPad, buy a hard drive, copy off my Studio 14 hard drive, sell it for a desktop with better power, and then when the iPad2 comes out eventually, I'll buy that.

So I'll end up with big fat desktop which will retire the e1505 to be donated, the Chrome laptop for Grad School portability, the iPad2 as backup portable/coffeeshop (if I actually feel like I need it in a few months, we'll see) and the phone for... phoning.

Anyway, my main thought is that since my iPad is not really for apps so much as internet when I'm out and about, even beta software on the chrome will do that just fine, and give me the battery life I need.