Phoning It In

By Ernest Lilley

August 25, 2003

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Despite the best of intentions, I didn't get this column filed before taking off on vacation, so here I am sitting outside my brother-in-law's house in Pearl City, Hawaii, where he's stationed with the Navy, surfing the web through a variety of leaky Wi-Fi installations in his neighborhood. Which brings up the issue of Wi-Fi security. If you've set any of your folders to "share," you really need to make sure you've got some sort of security, and the place to start is by enabling WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol). While it's true that WEP can be cracked with minimal equipment and some time to kill, so can the lock on your front door. Unless you want to share your access with the world, turn your WEP on. Feel free to use VPN and MAC filtering too.

By spousal edict, I was only allowed to bring one laptop, and though it's not as light as my normal laptop, I opted for a Panasonic Toughbook Tablet/Laptop that arrived as I was packing. The CF-18 has a reduced keyboard and a 12.1 inch screen, so it's not the most ergonomic gadget I could have taken, but the high output display is doing credible job of letting me type in tropical sunshine, the sealed keyboard is keeping the volcanic sand out of the works, and its Centrino architecture got me from the East Coast to the 50th state on a single charge, though I didn't actually work continuously. Set to about medium on the brightness meter the battery claims six-plus hours of life, and I haven't used them up before recharging. On the other hand, it gets better marks as a laptop than a tablet, since it's about an inch and a half thick and the stylus that's included looks like a refugee from a Palm III. For all its thickness, the CF-18 doesn't come with a CD/DVD drive, but then, it's not designed for taking on vacation, or even to the office, but instead into the field where toughness is more important than sleekness.

My primary topics this month are the new wave of PDAs and smart cellphones, which continue to get smaller and more powerful, but in ways that I actually appreciate, rather than by just adding extras for the sake of something to put in a press release.

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