Humans Can Survive Without The Internet

Several weeks ago I asked the question whether humans could survive without the Internet. Today I am happy to report I have proven we can. Well, may be not entirely and not for a long time. But for a couple of days on a thin life supporting pipe it is possible. The experiment was like the Gemini 7 mission - not to launch a naked man into Space, but to provide a minimal life supporting environment to test the endurance. Instead of a space suit and fuel cells, I spent a week long vacations only with my Blackberry and the Kindle.

I am sure you will laugh at this point. Both Blackberry and Kindle can access the Internet over any 3G mobile network or a WiFi, so what was the deal? Well... sure they can, but as I was roaming, I tried to keep the use of cellular data on the Blackberry to a minimum. This meant just looking at the primary email account to see if there were any fire alarms to be handled. I also posted a few photos on my Facebook profile, but this was a one-way communication. I did not check status updates and messages from other people.

For a few other Internet activities I was using the Kindle. Apart from being the greatest ebook reader on Earth, the Kindle appears to be a wonderful Internet tablet. And I do not mean it can compete with the iPad or Honeycomb for multimedia and colors. But its biggest strength is it can connect to the Internet over almost any 2G or 3G network on the Planet. For free. The Internet Browser on Kindle is still labeled experimental, so in the end we may end up paying a small weekly fee. But it is unbeatable in situations you do not have access to a local prepaid SIM card, the hotel wants to charge you $20 a day or $5 an hour and your roaming data prices would be even higher.

The Kindle's Web browser is based of the WebKit, the best performing browser technology. So even using Kindle's slow CPU it renders pages with decent speeds. I found it worked best with light pages, targeted at mobile phones and their slow browsers. So for example the GMail basic worked much better than the fully blown AJAX - based GMail client. But what a feeling it is to have a tablet and read an email over foreign 3G network, not paying a cent for this. The Whispernet at work. Amazing. I was able not only to work through my GMail. I was able to read a couple of my favorite Internet forums. And even logged on to my online trading account at Schwab. Wow! Did you know you could trade stocks from a Kindle?

I have to say it was my first time I was using the Kindle for Internet access that long. But after a week I am convinced more than ever the 7-inch form factor is the right one for a tablet. Contrary to comments by Steve Jobs, 10 inch tablets feel big and heavy. 7-inch feels just right. And at "retina" resolution, a 7-inch display would be close to FullHD.

Now let us dream a little and picture the ideal "on the road" Web access device. 7-inch retina display, a fast processor, mechanical keyboard (as a heavy BlackBerry user I am sure I want one!), a week-long battery. And flat rate, worldwide 2G/3G/4G coverage. That would be a killer machine. It seems we are not that far off the target. At least from the technology standpoint. But whether the Whispernet, world-wide, flat-rate connection model prevails, remains to be seen.

And as a post scriptum I can say my RSS backlog is 2292 items long (Google Reader should have a "remove obsolete items" feature). But really... there should be a Kindle version of the Google Reader. The device seems to math the need perfectly. Only the application is missing...