Road warriors — and these days, who isn’t a road warrior? — rejoice. Mac OS X Tiger keeps you connected to your digital life even when you’re miles away from your desk.

Travel Security

With Tiger, you no longer need to worry about protecting your files when you’re on the road with your PowerBook or iBook. That’s because Tiger’s FileVault keeps your home directory safe from prying eyes by encrypting its entire content with a powerful AES-128 encryption (Advanced Encryption Standard with 128-keys). And it automatically encrypts and decrypts on the fly so you won’t even know it’s happening. So if your PowerBook or iBook should ever fall into the wrong hands, you can rest assured that no one will have access to your files.

Stay Connected Anywhere

If you’re a PowerBook or iBook user who moves between different network and wireless locations, Mac OS X Tiger has you covered. All of your network connections can be active at each location. For example, at work you may use the office’s built-in Ethernet connection to access your network. At home you might connect to the Internet through AirPort. Since all network interfaces are active in the default setup, Mac OS X automatically determines the proper network interface over which to transmit traffic. When you move, it automatically senses the change and connects to the appropriate network.

And if you connect and disconnect from servers frequently, Tiger will make your life a little easier. Tiger can maintain a persistent connection to file servers through sleep/wake cycles, even when your Mac is disconnected and reconnected to the network. You won’t have to reauthenticate to the server manually every time.

Sync with .Mac

If you’re a .Mac subscriber, you can store and share files, digital photos, calendars, contacts, bookmarks, etc., on an Apple server, available anywhere in the world using the Internet. Now Tiger’s .Mac Sync gives you even greater control over your synchronization options. Tiger also lets you access your iDisk when you’re not connected to the Internet. Say you want to make changes to your iDisk files using your PowerBook on the road nowhere near an Internet connection. With Tiger, you can — because it stores the contents of iDisk on your computer so it’s available when you’re offline; you work with your iDisk files just as you would with the files on your hard drive. And when you re-connect to the Internet, your changes are automatically synced.

Home on the Network

If you regularly work on a network at the office or school, and your organization uses Mac OS X Server v10.4 to host accounts, you can keep your home folder synchronized between your Mac and the network. Work offline all you want, then next time you connect to the network and log in, the files you added or changed will automatically synchronize with the matching network-based home folder. And the process works the other way too: Any new files on your network home folder are automatically copied to the home folder on your computer.

VPN Connection

When you’re away from your office but need to keep connected to your company’s private network, Tiger has you covered. It includes a built-in VPN client that supports the latest industry standards, such as L2TP and 802.1x. Just enter your account and server information and, with Tiger’s new VPN on demand, it’s as if you never left your office.

A Better Battery

Tiger improves battery life with an intelligent power management technology that manages your system automatically. For example, Tiger can slightly dim the display automatically when running on battery power, and it doesn’t require the hard disk to spin up as often to flush the disk’s cache. If you want to tune the settings manually, you can use one of the two alternative power profiles or you can create your own.

And you don't have to fear sleep. Mobile Macs wake from sleep in a second, almost as fast as it takes to lift the PowerBook or iBook screen.