You can infer things from people's blogs. Just looking at the so-called Wisconsin divas (Profs. Althouse, Brito, and Camic), I'm guessing that among their favorite gadgets are:
Prof. Althouse: Hard to tell which she favors more, her digital camera or her wi-fi laptop. She's always putting lots of neat pictures of Madison (WI), or wherever else she happens to be visiting. On the other hand, the wi-fi laptop allows her to blog from faculty meetings presumably while looking productive.
Prof. Camic: She also seems to favor her digital camera, as her blog is also full of colorful pictures.
Prof. Brito: High on the list has to be her self-described "beloved iPod." There's also her DVD-ROM equipped laptop.
I, however, have not blogged at all about my current favorite toy. I absolutely love my Palm Tungsten E, which was my last birthday present from my wife. It serves the following functions:
1) MP3 player -- I had to spring for an external SD card to put songs on, and then using RealOne, I was able to convert songs from my CDs to MP3 format and store them on the card. The downside is that a 64 MB card holds only about 22 songs; however, I'm enough of a creature of habit that a 128 MB card will probably hold all the songs I really need, and a 256 MB card definitely will. The sound is tinny out of the Tungsten E's non-stereo speaker, but any pair of headphones plays stereo sound. True, it's not as efficient and good at playing music as an iPod, but I'm not that much of a music afficianado.
2) Document reader -- with Documents to Go, I'm able to read compressed Word documents in a Word emulator. Although I don't have the Constitution loaded yet, I do have a number of Supreme Court cases that I keep referring to.
3) TV listings -- a luxury, especially since Yahoo! has the listings as well, but it's nice to be able to see what's on TV at 3 AM when the baby is up and I don't have the computer handy. (Yes, I could go to the TV Guide channel, but that doesn't tell what particular episode is showing, nor more than 2 hours out.)
4) Updated news, ABA Journal stories, and more -- courtesy of Avant Go, which gives you a free 2 MB worth of downloaded subscription content, including selected stories from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reuters, and MSNBC.com. Space.com satisfies the science geek in me, AccuWeather gives local weather forecasts, and metacritic.com offers movie reviews.
5) Photo album -- the screen is small (maybe 2.5x2.5 inches) but not much more so than wallet photos would be. So I just compress photos down to about 400x600 pixels and still get decent resolution, and I can show off my little guy!
6) Game player -- my old Palm IIIx was just not very impressive when it came to games. Grayscale, beeps, etc. The Tungsten E plays pretty amazing games, some that would be good even on a PC. Check out Warfare Inc., which is a pretty good Starcraft-type RTS game with impressive digital sound effects.
Yes, the Tungsten E doesn't have wi-fi capability and it can't replace a PC since it needs the PC for hot-synching, but it's so portable and handy. The question is whether I still need to bring a laptop for short trips, or whether I should just spring for the wireless keyboard and rely on the Tungsten E and a cellphone (for e-mail reading).
What a shock you mentioned TV listings.
Posted by: Brian | June 11, 2004 at 02:28 PM
Hey, the surprising thing is I just found the TV listing program this past weekend!
Ah, what would really be a killer app is a card that could pick up satellite TV. . . .
Posted by: Tung Yin | June 11, 2004 at 07:18 PM
I love that digital camera! You wont understand how cool it is until you start using it. Daily.
Posted by: Nina Camic | June 12, 2004 at 08:00 PM
Actually, I do use my digital camera almost daily to take pictures of little Nicholas. But it doesn't have the versatility of the Tungsten E.
Of course, if that's your cup of tea, the Palm Zire 71 comes with a built-in digital camera. . . .
Posted by: Tung Yin | June 12, 2004 at 08:05 PM