How much do I love Dropbox? A lot. For someone like me, who uses three laptop computers plus an iPad on a regular basis for production work, Dropbox is the best thing that’s come down the pike in a very long time. Dropbox is the practical quintessence of what cloud computing has to offer, while keeping synchronized (at least to the last time you logged onto the Internet) copies of files contained on all machines.

If you’re mulling replacing your MacBook Pro’s optical drive with a SSD to take advantage of “paired storage,” or for some other reason, a scan of Low End Mac’s John Hatchett’s latest column, “Are CDs and DVDs Necessary Anymore?” would be a timely and worthwhile read. Hatchett wonders if it won’t be long before optical drives disappear from MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

I don’t hate the Cloud. I don’t love the Cloud. To some degree I’ve been lured into the Cloud by webmail (in my case, Gmail, GMX, Yahoo! and Hotmail, in that order of use), and of course search engines, but I strongly resist the concept of the Cloud ever becoming the default medium for my digital activities. A rumor began making the rounds last week that Apple may be developing an iPhone “nano” that would be essentially a Cloud-based device.

O2 has done a great job of bringing the iPhone’s monthly tarriffs down in price, and now they’re about to give iPhone users free access to BT OpenZone and The Cloud. For those of you outside the UK, or who don’t know, BT Openzone and The Cloud are the two major Wi-Fi hotspot providers in more »