Cool!

Many of us in the service industry, especially Gravity users, have been using some sort of tablet PC. Some have opted to go with a full laptop that folds-back and converts to a tablet and have gone with a traditional tablet. Both have trade-offs. The full laptop is more bulky to carry around, but is more powerful and usable for traditional tasks. With a tablet or UMPC you are stuck with touchscreen only interface, or plugging in wires to connect a USB keyboard and mouse.

However, we may be on the cusp of a really fantastic alternative. Lenovo (formerly IBM’s laptop arm) recently announced a revolutionary concept at the annual CES (Comsumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas: the fully detachable screen. So instead of turning and folding and then carrying around the full laptop, you simply pull off the screen and you’re on your way with the tablet. Then you just attach it back to the keyboard base and you’re back to a laptop!

The way that it works is that they actually have two processors, hard drives, etc. One in the screen piece and one on the keyboard/base. So when you separate it the screen/tablet goes and runs on its own power. When attached, they actually work together and you have kind of a dual-processor unit.

Now, don’t get too excited yet. While in full connected mode it is running Windows 7 (which is Gravity compatible), in detached mode the tablet/screen is running a customized and scaled-down operating system called Skylight (developed by Lenovo), which could not run Gravity. However, if things continue to progress in this direction we could have a really viable solution here to give us best of both words.

What I can envision happening that would work for us is one of two scenarios…

1) Put all of the real brains in the tablet/screen instead. You could leave the large battery in the keyboard/base part, which would keep the weight of the tablet part down. This would allow you to always have the full Windows system no matter what.

2) If that adds too much bulk to the tablet and defeats the purpose (don’t think it should though)… why not have the tablet automatically fire up kind of a remote desktop? It would just have to be powerful enough to run that app and all of the horsepower could remain on the keyboard/base. You’d have to stay in wireless range (or at least have internet), but other than that limitation it should be the same experience!

Hopefully they will get there. We will keep you informed of any developments.

More Information: Press Release from Lenovo

We had some customers ask about a good way to mount their laptop/tablet PC in the truck. We have found a great product that has been successfully used by Gravity CRM customers called Jotto Desk. Check them out at http://www.jottodesk.com.

I also added a new feature. It will now save the state of the window when you close Gravity and restore it when you start it back up. So if you have the window maximized, it will be maximized next time. If you have it sized to half screen and half way down the page when you close Gravity to go home today, you will find it restored to that size and location when you start Gravity tomorrow. Just another little time saver.

To get this latest update, download the latest update in the downloads section and reinstall.

Now that the new update is here we are going to have a lot of frequent changes and updates from here on. This new version has been a LONG time coming and has been a huge overhaul. Some of the changes you will notice and some of the biggest ones are under the hood, but it has paved the way for the future of this software.

We will be utilizing this web site more. We have added a new downloads section so that you always have easy access to download the latest version of the software (or sometimes archived versions). We have also added a videos section that will have lots of tutorial videos. Many have been added today that talk about some of the new features in this update.

The data is safe on the hard drives and we will be looking to get that data recovered on Monday (4/6/09). We are going to use this opportunity to revamp the site and upgrade our server situation.

Look for more updates to the web site including updates on our recovery process and also we’ll start updating this site more frequently with updates. Version 2 of Gravity Office has been rolled out to some beta users. If you want a test copy, let me know. And I’ll work on some videos showing off the new software as well.

-Jason