The billboards for the iBook read "Your life. To go." I'm sure Steve Jobs had some little hand in crafting that statement to sell the iBook. Jobs also wants the Macintosh computer to be the "digital hub" managing our digital lives. So, here's my experiment. I have my iBook, I'm going to try to turn it into the digital hub. Here's how... I've unplugged my Clie 610C charger/Hotsync cradle from my PC. It's now going to be plugged into my iBook. I downloaded the beta version of Palm Desktop 4.0 for MacOS X. It's on my machine and running right now. I'll use that exclusively for my syncing. I'm waiting for Microsoft to get a version of their conduit for Entourage so that I can Hotsync with Entourage -- Entourage is the Mac version of Outlook XP.
I've taken my Sony MemoryStick reader from my PC and also hooked that into my USB hub. I'm going to us iPhoto to organize my photos. Already I'm liking iPhoto a lot. I put in about 50 pictures that I just took (the Fort Smith and iBook pictures) and it organized the well (by Year then Month then Day! Cool! Automatically into folders). iPhoto was a breeze to use to rotate some of the pictures and the interface is phenomenal -- simple to use, yet powerful enough for a geek like me.
Next to come onto the iBook is my Archos 6GB Recorder. Not quite an iPod, but cheaper and larger in capacity -- plus I'm not willing to depart with $400 just to have that cool looking iPod when my Archos works just fine.
Other things that I'll use my iBook to do is manage UltraMookie.com (remember MacOS X is basically BSD Unix with a pretty face, I still have all the Unix tools underneath to use!). For instance I'm writing this entry with my iBook while in bed. The AirPort is cool -- though I did the same thing with my Sony VAIO and its 802.11b card, the iBook just makes computing...well, more fun.
I have just one rule about this experiment, if it ain't MacOS X compatible then I'm probably not going to use it. I don't want to use Classic mode and I am definitely not going to boot into MacOS 9.2.2.
More updates to come on the experiment.