With the Right Technology, Work’s a Beach

I spent a recent Friday working at the Twin Lakes State Beach near California’s Santa Cruz Harbor. You heard that right. I planted an umbrella, took out the towel, fired up the laptop and gabbed on my cell phone. I was connected to the Internet at an acceptable speed and I had enough gadgets with me to make the day reasonably productive.

The point was to demonstrate just how far portable computing and the wireless Internet have come. (And to catch some rays.) We’re on the cusp of an age where you won’t have to compromise between being mobile and being productive. Soon, we won’t be stuck in offices where we have access to all of our tech tools. If not the beach, we could work at a neighborhood bar, at the local coffee joint or in the middle of the Nevada desert at Burning Man.

I may have been the only geek with a laptop on the sand, but I bet I was having more fun than everybody locked in their cubicles that day. The question is: Why doesn’t everybody work at the beach, or some place more inviting than an office?

In addition to suntan lotion, my survival gear included an Acer TravelMate 2480-2153 laptop, which sells for about $500 on the Internet. I used a Verizon Wireless USB720 cell phone modem to connect it to the Internet at an acceptable speed. The modem, $99 with a service contract, uses the Enhanced EV-DO Rev. A data network, which allows you to download at speeds of 600 kilobits a second to 1.4 megabits per second. This isn’t fast enough for a lot of Web surfing, but good enough for e-mail. And it allows me to go to the beach rather than be tethered to a WiFi network.

The laptop battery lasted for only an hour. But I boosted it to about 90 minutes with Xantrex’s XPower Powersource Mobile 100, which is on sale for $39.99 on Amazon.com. You charge this battery pack overnight and then plug your laptop cord into a socket on the small box.

After that power source ran out, I turned to the XPower Powerpack Solar charger from Xantrex. This $169 power pack weighs 16 pounds and is about the size of a boom box with a carrying handle. It comes with a solar cell that you lay out on the ground to recharge the battery as you draw down power. It keeps a 120-volt AC or 12-volt DC product running for several hours. The day was a little overcast, but the solar charger worked fine and my power held out.

The ocean waves were noisy and mesmerizing. I did a couple of phone calls on the speaker phone of the Motorola Q Music 9m. The voice quality was good on the dual speakers and the folks on the other end of the line said they weren’t disturbed by the ocean waves. I used the speaker phone to record the calls on my Olympus digital voice recorder. I also used a BlackBerry Curve from AT&T to glance at my e-mails when I didn’t feel like using the laptop.

Beyond these gadgets, I kept my load to a minimum. But when you use your imagination, you can enhance your ability to work anywhere. David Fradin, a Saratoga, Calif., resident and founder of cell phone game maker MauiGames, says he works on the beach six weeks a year in Maui. He gets his high-speed Internet access by setting off a WiFi router with a special antenna that can link to a wireless Internet network in a nearby hotel suite or condo. He turns on a Webcam to show everyone what they’re missing. In the future, when long-range high-speed Internet networks such as HSDPA and WiMax are operational, it will be even easier to surf the Web while you surf at the beach.

My morale was high. But working at the beach isn’t as easy as setting up at a beach-side cafe or a hotel room with a view of the beach. I neglected to get an anti-glare screen for the Acer laptop I was testing. I was also working by myself most of the time, so I couldn’t take a dip in the water without risking the loss of my gear to beach bandits. To go to the restroom, I had to pack everything up and carry it a few hundred feet and back.

I didn’t anticipate the problem of getting sand in my electronics. I did bring a towel and set my devices down on it. But sand just has a way of getting into everything, sometimes because of the wind. Thankfully, everything still worked at the end of the day.

The wind picked up and I had to put on a sweat shirt and turn the umbrella sideways to block it. But when my family joined me, I was finally able to run around on the beach with my kids and dip my toes in the cool Pacific Ocean.

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