My employer is moving my family and me to be based out of our company's Seattle office. We'll be leaving Utah at the end of June, probably right in time for the first Chromebooks to hit the market. My daughter is the first grand child, and for a little while now, my dad has been considering ways to stay in touch. Sure, there's the good old fashioned telephone, but with the available technologies, he wants to try to find a way to make use of a video phone so he can talk to his only granddaughter face to face. Problem is, I don't think there is an out of the box solution that's going to work.
Issue #1, they don't have a computer with a web cam or microphone enabled. Issue easily resolved with a Chromebook. Built in mic and cam, and it couldn't be easier to launch Google talk to get this thing going.
Issue #2, no WiFi. I really have to do some research here, but I think I'm looking at a minor issue with living in the cloud. My parents do not have any internet connectivity in their home. It's not because of the inability to get connectivity. The fact is that they can easily get cable, my dad just isn't willing to allow the cable carrier to dig a trench and lay the cable in spite of the fact that these days, the machines used to lay the cable, leave little to no trace of the trench. I won't get in to the whys of his issues, it simply is what it is. Satellite is not an option in my mind. I've used that type of service myself, and it's unreliable, and overages are expensive. As far as I know, they're not in range for DSL, and they currently live outside of a 4g area.
I do plan to try to get him to pick up a Chromebook when it's available, along with a cheap data plan, but I don't know if that's going to solve the issue. I just don't know how we'll go about getting his Chromebook online. Maybe this will be the thing that pushes him past his fear of digging a trench for cable in his back yard.
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