I spent years as a reporter, trudging round the world with a pen and a notebook. Hated those things. In the Times office in Grays Inn Road I had a filing cabinet full of spent notebooks, filled with my dreadful shorthand. If anybody had seriously asked me to retrieve something from them -- and it happened from time to time -- I struggled to decode the shorthand even if I could find the thing in the first place.

We live in the computer age. Making simple notes on the go and keeping them ought to be easier than this. The software's not the problem. There's plenty of stuff around, including <a href="http://www.evernote.com/" target="_blank">Evernote</a> which is the main general note keeping app I use. It lets you write things and store web pages then syncs them back to its own servers and shares them around with your other computers and phones and netbook or whatever.

No, it's the hardware. The pen and notebook replacement. Lord knows I've tried so many over the years. These include the Apple Newton, Palm Pilots, iPaqs, iPhones, Tablet PCs, iPod Touches, my present Android phone... the list goes on. Now I'm about to try another. Why is this basic requirement, one so many of us crave, so blasted hard to fulfil?

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Let me take you through some of the reasons for failure first.

Newton: based on handwriting recognition, which didn't work and wouldn't have been sufficient even if it did. I don't want to write. Typing's faster and more accurate.

iPaq, iPods, all those little phone/PDA thingies: too damned small. Picking out a real or virtual tiny keyboard with your thumbs is OK for a sentence but no more than that. Currently I use a great little app on my Android phone - Note Everything (free in basic form though I paid the pittance for the Pro version, as I usually do, in order to encourage whoever's behind it to keep on working). For what it does it's wonderful -- better than anything I've tried before. But it's still a struggle to write more than a sentence or two.

Next week I go to Seville for work. This will involve a lot of footslogging, sitting down in cafes, outdoors even if the weather's nice. There I'd like to be able to make proper notes. You know, paragraphs. Lots and lots of text. I cannot pick that out with my thumbs. My MacBook Air is too big to lug around all day and the battery packs in after two hours or so. I need something smaller, something that runs all day, and has a decent keyboard for proper work. This is supposed to be it.

It's an Asus 1005HA, £279 delivered from Amazon. It has Windows 7 on it, 1gb of memory and a massive 250gb hard drive. The battery life is supposed to be 8.5 hours. Sounds good in principle. Here are the problems.

Windows 7.

Windows 7.

Windows 7.

Yes, I know I normally use Macs. I could, if I wanted try to install OS X on the thing. But it's technically difficult and legally dodgy (as someone who lives by intellectual property myself I don't feel I should be messing with other people's). So my first instinct is to try to work with Windows and boy that's hard. I've had this netbook for a day now. I've lost count of the number of updates I've installed already. It banged in a bunch yesterday. Just now I tried to close it down, one day later, and it says it's installing another twelve and won't close until it's finished. What gives?

Windows on a 10 inch screen is the same as it is on a bigger monitor only worse. Still too complex, still asking me strange questions from time to time (yes, I do want to run that application, thanks -- that's why I clicked on it). I can't run Scrivener of course. But I can run Evernote and it looks OK. And I put MS Office on there in the thought that perhaps I could use OneNote for note-taking. Then took one look at the thing and ran screaming around for a while.

<em>All I want to do is take simple notes. How hard can it get? Why is everything so complicated and so terribly slow.</em>

Well I guess if it's going to be Windows I'll stick with Evernote, even though that looks horribly fiddly on the ten inch screen. The truth is computers are changing. These little information beasts require something other than the big, do everything operating systems we're used to -- Windows and OS X. People are starting to realise it too and offering netbook OSes such as <a href="http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr" target="_blank">Ubuntu Netbook Remix</a>, <a href="http://moblin.org/" target="_blank">Moblin</a> and <a href="http://www.jolicloud.com/" target="_blank">Jolicloud</a>. And next year we'll get Google's OS too, Chrome, which should be interesting.

The trouble is it takes a little skill getting these things running on a netbook while keeping Windows too (which I think I should). UNR, Moblin and Jolicloud are all tuned to smaller screens and simpler tasks. I've tried Moblin and thought it was OK, but failed to get it to install (I give up easily). So for the next week or so I'm going to be trying Jolicloud. It comes with a simple installer that lets me choose between Windows and it whenever I turn on the computer. It looks dead simple. And it's cleared to be compatible with my model of Asus so everything seems to work, most importantly the wifi, without demanding any technical tweaking on my part. Here's a screenshot which give you an idea of what the applications directory looks like -- clear and simple. So much easier than messing around with the Windows start menu and icons on a messy desktop.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/07-reporters-notebook-web-ready.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/11/application.directory.icons_.png"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/07-reporters-notebook-web-ready.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/11/application.directory.icons-tm.jpg" alt="application.directory.icons.png" width="460" height="269" /></a>

Initial impressions? Fantastic. You don't have to scroll around all the time. You can install stuff with no great problems. There seem to be plenty of apps, including Google Chrome. Not sure what I will use for writing my notes just yet. But I'll let you know how it goes. And I have ten free Jolicloud invitations so if you'd like one get in touch through the contact form on the site here. But first do check you have a compatible netbook on <a href="http://www.jolicloud.com/compatibility" target="_blank">the Jolicloud list</a>. And do not come to me for technical support!

Here it is, below, sitting on my MacBook Air to give you an idea of size, with the Evernote Windows client running fine (though it has to be the 3.1 version since the newer 3.5 requires Microsoft stuff that won't work with Linux and it's pretty basic to be honest). Still there is a native and working Dropbox client for it which works just the way everything else does. So whatever I choose to use for notes I can dump stuff easily in there for backup and to share it around. Cloud computing they call it. Bloody marvellous.

The one glitch I've seen so far: this should allow me to boot between Windows and Jolicloud when I turn on the machine. But the option flashes past so quickly I haven't managed to go back to Windows yet. And maybe I won't need to. Microsoft is surely in big trouble here...

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