Gadgets
Warning: this entry is full of gadget geekery and nothing else.
A bunch of potentially cool gadgets have come out lately—newer versions of gadgets I own—and I'm trying to decide whether to buy any of 'em.
For example, Kam recently obtained the PowerShot SD300 Digital Elph camera from Canon. I own the nicely small PowerShot S230: a 3.2MPixel camera with 2x optical zoom, roughly the size of a deck of cards. The latest generation of what I've got is the PowerShot S500 Digital Elph, which is a 5Mpixel camera with 3x optical zoom, the same size as mine. But the SD300 is a 4Mpixel camera with 3x optical zoom—so it's much better than mine, and almost as good as the S500—in a significantly smaller package, with a significantly larger LCD screen. It's astonishing. Oh, and it uses SD cards (same as my Palm), so it can fit several times the capacity of my camera's compact flash card into a piece of plastic the size of a postage stamp.
My current camera still works fine. It does everything I need. But when it's in its protective case it's a bit bulkier than I'd like, and I would love to have a better zoom and a larger screen. The SD300 is extremely tempting.
But what if another SD (ultra-tiny) generation comes along soon that's 5Mpixel? Wouldn't that be even cooler?
And I don't really need a new camera. I just want it.
Meanwhile, as I noted a couple months ago, PalmOne has released a new PDA model, the Tungsten T5. It's way cooler than the m500 I've got—but it's way less cool than what I was hoping for/expecting from this generation of Palm PDAs. Various people have suggested getting a Tungsten T3 instead; it's the old model, but it's better than the T5 in some ways and not significantly worse in others. The T3 has a vibrating alarm (which I use all the time on my m500) and a voice-memo option (which would be way more convenient than using my iPod for that); the T5 is missing both those things. The T5 has more memory, but that's partly offset by the way the operating system uses memory. I don't like the collapsible design of the T3, but I'm told it works pretty well.
But then there's the Treo 650, which combines cell phone and PDA. The screen isn't as big as the T3 or T5, and it has less memory than the T5; but it has way more memory than my m500, and PalmOne is giving away a free high-capacity memory card with purchase to make up for consumer disappointment with the memory handling in the new models. I don't know how I would like having a phone and PDA in the same unit, but the few people I know who have such things like them a lot.
And then, too, it's possible there'll be a new Palm PDA that uses the new Palm OS Cobalt sometime soonish. But there might not be.
Decisions, decisions. Maybe I should just bottle up my gadget-buying enthusiasm for another few months in hopes of Apple finally releasing a PowerBook G5.
