As I thought about replacing the tablet, I thought to myself, “Hey, what about a Mac?”Macs, after all, are celebrated for their multimedia management, and I thought I might be able to shift my a/v editing tasks from the desktop to a new MacBook, thus extending the life of the desktop for another year or two.

I was concerned, of course, about compatibility with Windows systems. After all, my primary use for a notebook is to run my IT consulting business while I’m out of the office, and that’s a Windows world. Not only are all my clients using Windows, but some of the cloud services I use require Internet Explorer for full functionality. Some quick research convinced me that this would not be a problem. Not only does the Mac OS have a bunch of features designed to facilitate networking with Windows – including BootCamp, which allows the Mac hardware to boot into Windows — but by using Parallels, an inexpensive software program, I could easily switch back and forth between Mac and Windows environments.

With my compatibility concerns assuaged, I started looking at pricing. My wife is a college professor, so we’d be eligible for an educational discount from Apple. I spec’d out the following system:

• 15-inch MacBook Pro (Hi-Res Antiglare screen)
• 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7
• 4 GB RAM (2 DIMMS)
• 500 GB SATA drive, 7200 RPM
• DVD +/- RW
• Aperture and Final Cut Express (photo and video editing)
• AppleCare Protection Plan
• One year One-to-One membership at the Apple store (figuring I might need some help with the OS transition)

Total price: $2,875.00

That’s a good chunk of change, so I started wondering what it would cost to solve my performance problems while staying on a Windows platform. First, the laptop, a Dell Studio 14 running Windows 7 Home Premium:

• 14” Hi-Def screen (including facial recognition for logging on – cool!)
• 1.6 GHz Intel Core i7 (2.8 GHz Turbo Mode)
• 4 GB RAM
• 500 GB SATA drive, 7200 RPM
• DVD +/- RW
• Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere Elements
• 1 GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD video card
• 3-year warranty with on-site support

Total price: $1,328.00 … and that’s street price. As a Dell reseller, I should be able to get a better deal.

Having halved the cost of the laptop, it occurred to me that I might be able to replace the desktop as well. I priced out a Dell Vostro 430 running Window 7 Home Basic (as a Microsoft partner, I can upgrade the OS at no charge):

• 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7
• 4 GB RAM (2 DIMMS)
• 160 GB SATA drive, 7200 RPM (I already have two 250 GB 7200 RPM drives that I can re-use)
• DVD +/- RW
• 1 year warranty

Total price: $890.00

So if I got a new Windows laptop AND and a new Windows desktop – both of which should be crazy fast compared to what I have now – I’d spend $657 LESS than if I bought a comparably spec’d MacBook Pro.

Can anyone make a compelling case for why I should go Mac?

If want someone figure out a way to harness this thing so I could walk around with the screen at arm’s length. Of course, I’d also need it to run on a rechargeable battery, and we’d probably need to cut at least 15 pounds off it to prevent me from breaking my back. Other than that, though …

I just checked all of my suit / sport coat jacket pockets and none of them are wider than 4.75”. Add the thickness of the machine, and there’s no way they could fit anything wider than 4”. Some overcoats might have outer pockets wide enough to accommodate the VAIO, but a computer stuffed into a pocket like that would probably fall out or be stolen. Just look at the picture. Can you imagine any article of clothing that would have a pocket big enough for that thing?

The sucker is huge and consumes a lot of desk space all by itself, but its big pockets and Lazy Susan design have allowed me to keep everything that used to be stacked in front of me within arm’s reach and yet out of the way. I’ve labeled three of the four sides: “To Do,” “To Read,” and “To Write.” The fourth side currently holds blank paper for jotting down phone numbers and other notes that will later go into the “To Do” slot.

This is of course not the first desk organizer I’ve tried, but so far it’s the only one that’s actually accomplished its mission for more than a few days.

So we drove out to the one Apple store in Massachusetts that allegedly had iPhones in stock, but by the time we got there (20 minutes before the store opened) there were already so many people in line that the sales clerks told us we had no chance of getting one that day.

Just as well.

There was an AT&T Wireless retail store in the same mall, but they didn’t have any iPhones either. And we needed to get something fast to replace my wife’s phone, even if it was just on a temporary basis until we could get the iPhone. So we drove all of three minutes to the nearest AT&T retail store. There I was able to get my hands on a demo unit, so I was finally able to see that … I hated it.

There is no question that the iPhone is pretty. Downright beautiful, to be honest. But usable? Not for me.

The on-screen keyboard was cute, in a way. I liked the little click it made when you hit a key, and I liked the way the key you were typing popped up from under your finger so you could see what key you had just hit. The problem was that quite often the key I hit was NOT the key I intended to hit. So if I wanted to type “No, I didn’t get an iPhone,” what I actually typed might resemble what you see in the title of this post. I could tell that composing e-mail on that thing was going to be really frustrating.

There were other drawbacks to the iPhone:

• The Safari browser does indeed render web pages just like a regular browser. You can see the whole page at once. And it’s really, really, really small. So you have to use the two-fingered “un-pinch” motion to zoom in on what you want to see, and then scroll around to find what you’re actually looking for. Yuck.
• Although it may be technically capable of acting like a modem so you can use it to connect your laptop to the Internet, AT&T and/or Apple won’t allow that, at least not right now.
• Scrolling around the screen using finger wipes instead of keys is hip and fun and all that, but pretty imprecise. I hated flipping right by the icons I was trying to find and then having to go back.
• Apple has clearly put a lot of energy into making the iPhone an awesome device for listening to music and watching video. But you know what? I don’t really need to listen to music or watch video on my PDA-phone. What I really need to do is make phone calls, read and write e-mail, and find stuff on the web.

So we said no to the iPhone, and both of us got the Motorola Q9h, a.k.a Motorola Q Global. I could describe it, but you might as well watch one of the reviews on YouTube, like this one.

So far, a little more than 24 hours after purchase, I’m quite pleased with it. The keyboard rivals any BlackBerry I’ve used, and having the keyboard always available is a big upgrade for me compared to the slide-out keyboard on my XV6700.

The Q is not without its own problems. Connection to the AT&T 3G network seems a bit spotty, with frequent switches over to the slower Edge network. And AT&T has still not released an upgrade from Windows Mobile 6.0 to WM 6.1, to the frustration of many Q users. But I don’t regret passing on the iPhone for a minute.

Take a look at some of the features included in this service pack. The question I had after reviewing the list was why anyone would have bought a system that didn’t have these features to begin with. Who wants a phone system that doesn’t have “easy transferring, parking, and dialing?”

Unfortunately, this product simply adds credence to the theory that one should never buy any Microsoft product before its first service pack is released. On the other hand, Microsoft history suggests that Response Point 3, whenever they get to it, will dominate the market.

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My quick take on the system, based on less than three hours of experience:

• Compared to what was on the market a few years ago, this looks great. It has a ton of features available that previously cost much more to purchase and configure.
• Compared to what is on the market today, it looks so-so. There are many, many choices today for small business Voice over IP phone systems. The core feature sets are all pretty much the same. They all give you voicemail, voicemail to e-mail, call transferring, call forwarding, auto-attendant and directory services, ability to use either PSTN (traditional) or VoIP carriers for outside lines, and so forth. Response Point has some neat features that others may not, particularly in the area of voice recognition and Outlook integration, but it also has some limitations. For example, if you are using PSTN lines you are limited to a maximum of 8 concurrent outside calls. Also, if I understood what the instructor was saying correctly, there is only one VoIP carrier for external calls that Response Point supports, and that carrier happens to be Microsoft. Response Point was really designed with analog phone service in mind.
• Response Point definitely has a "1.0" feel to it. In fact, even though the product was announced almost eight months ago, the first units won’t be shipped to customers until later this month. Some important decisions (like whether there will be an extra charge for future software upgrades) seem not to have been made yet.
• Although you might expect a Microsoft product designed for small business to have all kinds of integration features with Microsoft Small Business Server, it doesn’t. There is a little administrative plug-in to the SBS management console, but there’s no direct integration between user accounts in SBS and user accounts in Response Point.

In the coming months, you are going to see a LOT of small business IT consultants, contractors, and vendors starting to provide phone system advice and services. My recommendation to a small business today looking for a phone system would be to find a company that has been working with telephony for at least a year or two and is familiar with many if not all of the options out there. If you’re getting advice from someone who’s just gotten into the field, you’ll probably be speaking with someone who’s partnered up with one particular manufacturer and is trying to sell that particular system wherever they can.

I have to advise a client on selecting a phone system this month, and I’m going to be speaking with many, many people before making a recommendation. But I do know one thing: I’m not going to recommend Response Point.

Fortunately, I was able to solve this without wiping his computer clean and rebuilding it from scratch. I didn’t even have to take control of his PC remotely and fiddle with it. The solution: a new keyboard. His old one must have had some sort of short circuit that was equivalent of having a stuck delete or backspace key. (I never did figure out whether the letters were vanishing from right to left or left to right.)

If only my entire job were that easy ….