Most business travellers would agree that staying light and in touch are the two main advantages of mobile computing. However, these advantages are also the greatest challenges notebook users face.
'Taking full advantage of mobile computing requires a minimum of planning ahead, technical skills, and faith - quite a lot for one man,' said Jean-Maurice Herpin. He spends 60 per cent of his time on the road and recently left for Australia with a PowerPoint training presentation of more than 100MB . . . and no back-up.
Before he left, Mr Herpin found he could not connect his notebook (Texas Instruments' 5300 P133) to the Iomega Zip drive he had just purchased.
Faced with spending the whole day copying his presentation on to several dozen diskettes, or making a hard copy of about a hundred slides, Mr Herpin decided to put all his faith into his notebook, hoping it would not crash.
Fortunately, it stayed the course. But it did not connect to the slide projector used by the office in Australia.
'No equipment is as 'plug and play' as vendors like to claim,' Mr Herpin said.