Three years ago, I set up an Exchange 2003 server with the goal of having a single, unified mailbox, calendar, and address book that would always remain synchronized across my computers and Windows Mobile smartphone. The setup has held up really well with very little maintenance all these years, and it continues to work seamlessly even with the iPhone 3G that I bought last year.

But there’s one thing I was never quite happy with — Outlook Web Access (OWA), the Exchange web-mail interface. If you’re using any browser other than Internet Explorer, OWA falls back to a clumsy, limited-functionality version. While cross-browser support has improved somewhat in OWA 2007 (which I tested in a virtualized environment recently), it’s still not quite where I’d like it to be.

When it comes to web-based email, I consider Gmail the shining star — the UI is clean and simple, navigation is blisteringly fast, and its threaded messaging implementation is a killer feature. Offline access to Gmail and Google Calendar is now possible using Google Gears. iPhones and other smartphones can synchronize with Google Contacts and Calendar using the recently released Google Sync service (which, interestingly, happens to use Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync engine to “push” updates back and forth). The only missing piece is “push” Gmail, and that might be coming soon too.

So the question is — in the coming months, will the Google Apps suite finally be a truly viable, free alternative to small-scale Exchange Server installations like mine?  I think so. After all, it’s well on its way towards becoming something like a hosted Exchange account with a vastly better web-mail interface. If and when “push” Gmail does become available, I’ll definitely be giving it a very close second look.

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After my previous post on the subject, I decided that I really needed to get some hands-on time with a few netbooks in order to make a decision. Because they’re all so similar in terms of hardware configuration, it really comes down to the smaller details.

So I went downtown to the J&R store here in NYC to have a look. They seem to have the widest selection of netbooks on display, compared to other retailers like Best Buy, etc. For about 20 minutes, I tried out a few different ASUS Eee PCs, the MSI Wind, two HP Mini models, the Acer Aspire One, and a white Samsung NC10. They didn’t have the Dell Mini and the Lenovo S10. The choice wasn’t very difficult…

I immediately realized that I simply couldn’t put up with anything smaller than a 10″ display, and that narrowed down the selection considerably. Next, I knew I wanted all the battery life I could get — after all, these things are meant to be on-the-go machines, so you don’t want to worry about hunting for the nearest power source all the time. The Samsung NC10 ships with a 6-cell battery;  reviews indicated that it could easily pull off 6 – 7 hours with WiFi on, and the brightness turned down a bit. And because the 6-cell is standard on the NC10, it doesn’t stick out like the “extended” batteries do on most other machines.

I liked what I saw of the NC10 — the build quality was solid, the screen appeared bright and sharp without the awful glossy coating that seems all too common these days, the keyboard had a good size and feel, and it was tiny and light. But I wasn’t quite sold on the toy-like white model that J&R had in stock.

So that night, I ordered a black one from Newegg, and it arrived the next day in a shockingly small box. My initial impressions were summarized in less than 140 characters, and that opinion hasn’t changed since… :)

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