Netbooks have become extremely popular over the last two years, the price and size are extremely appealing. Nearly every major PC manufacturer has got in on the netbook craze and plenty of other unexpected companies too. Nokia is one of those companies stepping outside of its comfort zone with the Booklet 3G.

I have always been partial to the idea of a netbook although I am not completely sure why. Over the last 12 months I have had a look at a few options (the HP Mini 110, the Compaq mini 311 and Dell Mini 10) but for the most part the build quality of the machines has been pretty poor. Plastic chassis and flimsy keyboards are a common feature.

The Good

Nokia seem to have the build quality wrapped up well. The Aluminium body feels extremely sturdy and while the keyboard is plastic, its feels strong and responsive. It is a stunningly well designed and attractive little gadget. Inside it packs the very standard Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor but despite this it seemed fast enough for most netbook related activities (web, video, music). Perhaps this is testament to beautiful things working better? Other highlights of the booklet 3G include the battery life (around 12 hours) and the built in 3G sim card slot – negating the need for a large 3G dongle.

The Bad

While size is one of the big attractions of netbooks it leads to many compromises. The screen resolution is too big (1280 x 720) for such a small screen and the keyboard feels cramped when typing. The screen is surrounded by a large black bezel which suggests the chassis could accommodate a larger screen and it would certainly benefit from it. The keyboard area also has space for larger keys which would be a big help. The other two negatives are the price (£650) which is twice the cost of similar specification machines and the operating system: Windows 7. Having used OSX for the past six years it seems like a step backwards with Windows 7. I would rather see and use a well thought out Linux distribution, perhaps Jolicloud?

Conclusion

Netbooks are a fairly strange concept if you think about it. As our mobiles get more powerful, do we need a device to bridge the gap between our (bigger) laptops/desktops and phones? After all the gap between our computers and phones is getting smaller all the time. My feeling is that I do not need a device that sits in this space, at least not at the moment. I am left wondering what are people using netbooks for and when?

If you would like to find our more about the Nokia Booklet 3G you can find the full specification on the Nokia site and we have also uploaded a few unboxing photos to Flickr. We would also like to say thanks to WOMWorld/Nokia and Carl for supplying the test unit. Keep an eye on the toggle shop for netbook cases arriving in the next few days.

Google Apps

• By: Google
• Cost: Free

Google Apps needs little introduction these days. We make full use of Gmail, Google Docs and the Google Calendars on a daily basis. The great thing about the apps is the collaboration; sharing not only between ourselves but with our clients too. If you want to know more about getting started with Google docs then I suggest watching some videos on the subject. We have also transferred some of our clients over to the platform as well.

Remember the Milk

• By: Remember the Milk
• Cost: Free or a pro account for $25 a year

Remember the Milk is one of the newest apps in the toggle tool kit. After deciding to leave Basecamp we needed a robust to-do application and found Remember the Milk. The great thing about it is the fact you can add to-do items from a whole range of devices and services; our favourites being Gmail, Email and via the iPhone application Todo <- iTunes link.

Pixie

• By: Toggle
• Cost: Free

Shameless plug alert! – We use Pixie every day (I am writing this post in Pixie). It allows us to easily manage the content for the sites we make, and our clients can join in too. For those of you who have not tried Pixie, it is our open source CMS. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Delicious

• By: Yahoo!
• Cost: Free

Tired of never having your web bookmarks with you? Try posting all your favourite sites to Delicious. We have been using Delicious for quite some time now, its one of those services that quietly gets on with its job and works flawlessly. The tagging is great and the recent re-design has made it even more of a pleasure to use.

I think that just about covers the really important applications we use, other honourable mentions go to Flickr, FeedBurner and Google Analytics.

We felt it was like putting a designer into the office of every client, a way to improve communication and bring them closer to the design process. Eight months later and we have decided to change the way we work… Basecamp no longer rocks our socks.

I think our biggest problem with Basecamp has been getting clients to accept it into their workflow. The truth is that nobody wants to sign in to yet another website to see a visual or make comment on it. Basecamp will send out a notification that a new file has been added to the project and that notification is delivered via email. What’s wrong with that? Well it would have been easier to simply send an email with the visual attached in the first place. Email is something everyone understands, its integrated into our lives and the way we work. Making use of it is not only easier for us, but for our clients to0. The more I think about email the more I feel the modern web needs to make MORE use of it, take a look at Posterous (they understand completely).

Having learned the lesson that email works much better for our clients we decided to keep using Basecamp for ourselves. The main sections of Basecamp we used frequently were the to-do lists, writeboards and occasionally the time tracking. By far the most important to us were the to-do lists. Both Gemma and myself are big fans of creating to-dos, nothing feels better than checking off an item from the list, you can feel the progress rush every time you do it. The thing is with Basecamp your to-dos are all over the place, each project has its own to-do list (which makes sense on first look) but in reality all we wanted to know is: “What needs to be done today?”. Navigating back and forth between projects to check the various to-do lists is slow progress in Basecamp (why is it so slow to load a page?) and it simply was not working for us. We also did not have a project for “everything else”, a place where we could set non-project related to-do notes such as “ring the tax man”. So we created a nice generically named project called “General” and set up a to-do area that looked a little like this:

It worked out very well for us, suddenly the time we spent clicking around Basecamp fell dramatically and my internal productivity monkey was smiling again.

Over time our usage of Basecamp began to fall, the writeboards were not as feature rich as Google docs (or as convenient) and the time tracking kept being forgotten. We found the best way to manage our time is with Google calendars and its built in reminders. The only thing we could not replace was the to-do lists until I decided to investigate Remember the Milk and found that it now integrates with Gmail:

We now have all our to-do lists right where we need them, they are shared between us and can be added to very easily via Gmail, Email, mobile phone, Google calendar and even Twitter. So the time has come to say goodbye to Basecamp, our new setup is simpler, fresher and most importantly saves us time.

Xscope

• By: Iconfactory
• Cost: $16, 1 license

X-scope is probably one of my favorite applications we use. Lining page elements up in Photoshop is easy because you have horizontal and vertical rules to help you; but this isn’t possible in a browser.

Until we got this application, I would either use a piece of paper (suprisingly effective!) or take a screen shot and apply the rulers in Photoshop, especially when it came to cross browser testing.

Most frequently used features:

The guides – Great for lining elements up.

The rulers – Great for pixel measurements.

Loupe tool – (magnification and colour picker). Before we had this, if we wanted to know a colour value on a site, we would have to take a screen shot and colour pick the value from Photoshop.

Parallels

• By: Parallels
• Cost: $80

Parallels is well worth the $80! Plus we got a free £25 gift card with it, which we used to donate money to open source software developers. Parallels allows you to run a virtual copy of Windows on your Mac.

Our main use for this application is cross browser testing (although we do use it for good games that you can’t get on a Mac!). We run Parallels in ‘OS Window’ mode, which means that Windows is running as if you have opened another application on your Mac. It makes switching from Windows to other applications on your Mac very easy. Parallels allows us to drag and drop files between Mac and ‘Windows world’ with ease.

Coda

• By: Panic
• Cost: $80

Coda is our preferred text editor. The application not only works brilliantly, it also has some nice design touches too! In the ‘Sites’ section, each of your websites is displayed as a site thumbnail taped to a background (see below). This makes finding the site you need out of a long list much easier.

It is very easy to publish local changes to the remote copy of a site. After you have saved your changes, a small upload icon appears next to your file, which you just click to publish.

There are two editing modes for CSS; text mode and visual mode. The visual mode is great for people who are learning because you can click on your element and use tools such as colour pickers and drop down boxes to create styles.

MAMP

• By: Living-e
• Cost: free

MAMP is an open source application that enables you to host sites on your local machine. Having the ability to set up an Apache server with just a few clicks has been really useful for testing sites and demoing Pixie to potential clients.

Integrity

• By: Softpedia
• Cost: free

Integrity is a free application that checks for broken links on your website. Using this application means that you don’t need to open up every link to check it works! You simply put in the url of the site you want it to crawl and voila! Need we say more on this one!