What do you need to be a productive home-worker bee? And no, we are not talking about investing a lot of money in fancy gadgets like video-conferencing tools or a pricey MacBook Air to get you working from home. Just imagine gadgets that can give you the chance to get up late in the day, avoid the rush-hour traffic jams and be close to your family.
Here are a few basic gizmos that will let you work from home, should the rains keep you in, this season.
The web
Start with a good wireless broadband connection. Tata Indicom’s Photon Plus and Reliance Netconnect Broadband Plus are the latest pocket-friendly options. Both are USB-based devices that demand no lengthy installation hassles and come with a built-in antenna that gathers the wireless broadband signal in your area. Operating system support for Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Mac OS X comes in-built with the Reliance and Tata Indicom devices.
During our review, the Reliance Netconnect Broadband Plus gave us an average downlink speed of almost 2 Mbps, which is good for a wireless system. The most basic Reliance Netconnect Broadband Plus monthly rentals start at Rs 299, with Rs 2 per MB of data usage. There is also an initial subscription charge of Rs 3,500 and activation of services is quite swift.
The Tata Indicom’s Photon Plus, a USB wireless internet connection, gave us an average downlink speed of about 1.4 Mbps. You will be required to pay the one-time installation charge of Rs 3500 for the Photon+ connection and tariff plans start from Rs 299.
Getting it all hooked
Once you have done the hard work of optimising your Wi-Fi network to beam high-speed data to every nook and cranny of your home, then it’s time to take it to the next level by connecting more than just computers.
For this you will need a router that will have a basic range of up to 300 metres, so that all your devices can be connected remotely. Belkin’s Enhanced Wireless Router, which costs Rs 2,719, is worth every penny. The router can easily cover an apartment or even a small office, and lets you share your broadband internet account with all your networked devices. There are enough security standards that Belkin’s router packs along. Wireless security options include WEP and the PSK (Personal) forms of WPA, WPA2 and a mixed WPA/WPA2 mode, including the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS).
All-in-one
For that complete connected household, you need to add a printer that is affordable for your pockets and yet does everything that your office printer boasts of. For instance, the Epson Stylus Photo TX700W that is a wireless, all-in-one, six-colour photo printer. The TX700W lacks a fax function, but offers ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, as well as a media card reader supporting MemoryStick, SD, xD, CompactFlash and a PictBridge-capable USB port. It gives an average text quality but photos look good. The best bit is that it can be hooked wirelessly to your home network, thereby scoring in its ease to use as compared to other printers. You will have to invest Rs 13,999, to bring this multifunctional printer home.
Canon’s Pixma MX-328 costs just Rs 8,595 but scans, copies, prints and can handle fax too. The printer can hold up to 50 fax messages in its memory and can print borderless photos up to A4 size, in roughly 40 seconds. The printer has a self-opening paper output tray and a Quick Start function to begin operations just five seconds after powering on. Auto photo fix helps optimise images before printing. For printing photos, you can directly use the PictBridge port, foregoing the trouble to install your camera software to print pictures. Pixma MX-328 allows the scanned documents to be saved as PDF or JPG files.
| The right laptop Finally, a laptop with a built-in wireless chip is a must for anyone who is thinking of working from home. So, in case the home internet goes down any time, you can still dash out to the coffee shop to send that last minute email. Zenith’s latest laptops, grouped under Ego and Envy collections, are machines that can make you proud. Styled brightly and priced at Rs 53,700, the laptops make a good show for your office at home. For Rs 59,990, you can get the HCL Leaptop Z39 that could be as good as the desktop at work. The Leaptop Z39 comes with 8 GB of RAM and a 500-GB HDD, practically eliminating the need to have an external hard drive for your data — music, movies, images and documents. A 14-inch screen is a pleasure to look at and bundled Windows Vista can help you set it up as your personal multimedia hub. |
In case you want a handy all-in-one web surfing package, then Datawind’s PocketSurfer 2, a dedicated handheld web surfing device with a 640 x 240 colour widescreen display and a QWERTY keyboard is your answer. The PocketSurfer’s proposition is simple — phones and PDAs currently deliver a quasi-internet experience that’s of little use. Pocketsurfer 2 recreates the PC browsing experience on a mobile device and that’s the only USP. The makers of Pocketsurfer 2 claim that it renders any web page faster than any other mobile device and we realised that it wasn’t too farfetched. It does load web pages faster than smartphones like Nokia N85, but it is totally network dependent due to lack of Wi-Fi. A 5-hour battery life, an inbuilt GPS unit, POP/IMAP/web mail support (including attachments), instant messaging and a web browser that supports HTML and Java is a decent proposition for a device that is priced at Rs 11,990. PocketSurfer2 bundles along an unlimited data usage plan at Rs 99 per month too.
Once you are set, make sure that you sweet talk your employer to format your current job into one you can do from home this season.
