So my first impressions are that this is *almost* good enough to be my laptop. I'm really pleasantly surprised at how much I can do on this machine alone.

Since I've had to prepare the mac for my parents, I must admit to having had the mac open every now and then. (Cleaning up file systems, deleting the bazillion expired trials of software I apparently have collected over the years etc..) But I would say I've spent about two solid days (and two half/half days) on the edge.

My two big concerns right now are Picasa (Google's photo system) and Google Maps.

Google Maps will technically work, in that it will find a location. But zoom practically crashes the browser, so it's basically useless. I do rely on Google Maps a lot because we travel and I often want to find a hotel near the client site, then check for amenities around the hotel so we're not stuck in the middle of no where with no car. That I have not been able to do. I haven't tried other map software, and I do have an iPod touch so I can rely on that. It's not that I need GPS or anything like that - I need this info when I'm deciding which hotel to book.

The edge directs me to Picasaweb's mobile site with no option to see the standard desktop view. The mobile version doesn't appear to have an upload picture feature. From what I've read, its seems like the camera app on Android phones has a "publish to Picasa" command, so I guess they figure Android users will send pictures via the camera. Admittedly, I haven't yet looked to see whether our camera app has that feature, but it's not pictures taken with the edge I'd want uploaded. On my mac, I have the Picasa software that categorizes your photos into albums/folders etc. and then it's one button to synch an entire local album with the desktop view. So my normal M.O. is to take pictures on the camera, load them onto my mac via Picasa import, then choose which ones I want to show up in the online version of the album. Unless there's a Picasa Uploader app (which there actually is for desktop clients, if you don't have the full photo organization software), then I don't see how to get the pictures into Picasa specifically, since I can't upload via the web. I can get them *online*, just not specifically into Picasa. So either I check out other options like Flikr or I simply decide that photos will have to be done irregularly on the mac. (Hubby still has his MBP and I have my bootable backup on an external hard drive, so whenever I need to I can just use his physical machine and boot to my system.)

Otherwise, I haven't found myself to be limited yet by being solely on the edge. I'm still organizing my files on the mac and then will have to decide whether to store them on some larger SD cards and/or in my online storage so that I can access them from the edge as needed. But, being retired, I don't really *have* to access past documents, and likely wouldn't have to urgently in any cases, and most of our travel planning is online in google documents anyway. So this can also be a boot to Joe's mac when I next get a chance solution. I was worried that the single-tasking nature of the tablet (as opposed to the resize two programs so I can see both at the same time trick I do on the laptop) would frustrate me, but it's perhaps allowed me to be a little more calm/focused. Having the second screen for jotting down notes (phone numbers, flight numbers etc.) far outweighs the disadvantage of not having a chat window visible while working in another window. And, with the "send to reader" function in the browser, if I'm just reading something fairly long, I'll typically send to the reader anyway and put twitter or IM on the LCD screen. So, I think I'm OK with that.

The things I can do just fine but maybe aren't perfectly thrilled with:

GCal - I've been spoiled by some really excellent Mac OS X Calendar software, and right now I'm limited to Google's mobile version. It works, and Executive Assistant is helpful for seeing the next few days in advance. But we live our lives in a variety of google calendars (mine, Joe's, tentative travel planning, Joe's "Where I'm appearing" public calendar for his consultancy, actual booked travel confirmations from Tripit . . . ) and I'm usually most interested in what's going on over the next few months than the next few days. The mobile version is, as one would expect, catered to knowing what you need to do in the next little while. Even the month view is just a small calendar, not the calendar with the items filled in on it. Many of our calendar items are weeklong "Training in Chicago" kind of entries, so it's not something that helps to look at daily for planning purposes. I've had problems with the browser telling me the desktop version is unstable/unsupported, but I can proceed at my own risk. So far it's let me in to view OK, but a better option would be helpul.

Email - Of course, this works and I can send/receive. But, what I find really annoying (and might just have to get over) is that emails sent from the built in email client show up in their own IMAP folder instead of the regular sent folder. When I'm in Gmail on the web, I should be able to live with it (even though I'm just a little fussy about things, and just knowing some sent mail is in two different folders gives me the twitches) because if I need to find something, I should just use search. But if I'm on the device's email where things are folder based, then I don't want to have to know which sent folder to go into to see an email that was sent/drafted from the client vs. on gmail's website itself. (Although, presumably search works there, too. I still don't *love* it.) I downloaded MailDroid last night and while it seemed to be a perfectly fine client, it didn't address that particular issue. So, not yet loving my email options and I have to spend more time figuring out exactly how I want to go about it.

I'm lazy and haven't yet got around to getting Dropbox set up, but that's on the list. (I have lifetime free storage on strongspace.com, so I've tended to use that, but I know Dropbox is supposed to be very easy so I really do intend to give that a shot.) I'm trying to organize my files better on the mac first so that stuff I don't need to access is more deeply buried within folders so that whatever file solution I do use, it's already optimized by the time it gets to the edge so I don't have to do much fiddling with it there.

I think that's the report for now! I know hubby's waiting for me to get to dishes, so I'll stop anyway!