Sunday, January 23, 2005

Gadgeters

After spending Idul Adha with my parents, I hitched a ride back to my place Saturday noon, and not 5 minutes upon arriving, I put everything down and went to Vira's place, because I had to transfer some old data from my Palm Desktop program to my Outlook program, and I had to use her PDA to do that. Her PDA, which is still technically mine :D.



So yes, over the process of the last 2 weeks, I sold my trusty Palm m515 to Vira, and finally got a second-hand Sony Ericsson P900. Why second-hand, do you ask? I got a good deal, the condition was still good, and I got a bonus of 2 memory cards and the card reader. These things have been very useful so far; in fact, the photos on the previous post about my trip to Bali were taken by the P900. To top things up, my ancient digital camera, which is cumbersome to carry around practically... has the same picture resolution as my new phone. So... perhaps, once I get the CF card reader from Sacha, which she has been borrowing for some time, I am going to give the camera to my parents (which should be easier for them to use, as Dad now has a computer running Windows XP). Which brings us back to the main story.



So afterwards, I had lunch with Vira, then went to Sacha's place, as we planned to go to Ambassador Mall, a mall filled with stores selling virtually everything, and with 2 floors with lots of electronics and handphone stores. As you might gather, a favorite place for me. Sacha wanted to upgrade her phone firmware, but as it took a while, we had a few hours to wander around. So, we thought it would be best if she started to ask around about memory card prices, for use with her PDA, a palmOne Zire 72 (one of my favorites). Eventually, she bought a 256 MB SD card with the card reader, so she could use the memory card both as external memory for her PDA (for listening to MP3s, for instance) and a USB flash drive; thus making her use of the CF card and card reader she borrowed from me useless, and returnable to the owner. Afterwards, her phone was ready with the new firmware, and then we went to her office so I could see what was wrong with her Palm Desktop program (which I fixed in about 5 minutes).



I'm pretty happy and satisfied with my phone, albeit that I seem to have some trouble transferring the Palm Desktop data to Outlook, with the issue unresolved until now. I still have some backup data on the Mac, as the data on the laptop seems to have disappeared, but I'll deal with that later. I can always grab the data from the office computer anyway. Otherwise, it's a good phone, with all the uses I need, and I just need a to work out a few quirks.



Vira is getting along fine with her PDA, which I have already given to her awaiting payment, as I wanted to detach my dependence on it, and Sacha is entering deeper into the world of gadgets. I'll be teaching Bluetooth uses soon to Vira. Looks like the PDA, or gadgets in general, has become more popular and acceptable in today's world, whereas when I first used a PDA, a Palm m100, in 2001, hardly anybody knew about PDAs, and tended to be a 'geekish' or 'male' trend or interest.



Now.... I'm setting my sights on a simple Ipod Shuffle.

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