One of the perks of my job is the delivery of gadgets and gizmos to my office (unfortunately, I do eventually have to give them back to the suppliers).
Enter three products — all apparently designed to empower me to run my business from the local coffee shop or, even more appealingly, from a beach home in Plettenberg Bay.
The first item I got to play with was the new Acer Ferrari Notebook. No, this is not the new code word for a range of notebooks but rather a Ferrari-branded notebook complete with fire-engine-red casing, engine sounds on start-up and funky desktop motifs. The verdict — functional, practical, with good specifications, although the reality is that you are buying the brand. The price is not competitive but if you are a Ferrari fan, this shouldn’t bother you much. Personally, I am waiting for the co-branded Ducati notebook.
The second item thrown in my direction was the new Motorola MPX 200, the “office in a pocket” cellphone. Not a personal digital assistant (PDA) but an actual cellphone that functions the same way as a PDA. In fact, this nifty little phone has made my vision of going off to do business from the beach even more of a possibility.
The phone runs off the new Microsoft SmartPhone operating system and synchronises seamlessly with programmes on your computer. Admittedly, PDAs have been doing this for some time and there are other devices that function in a similar way.
But what has sold me on this neat one is not the fact that it can be connected to the Internet via your handset while allowing you to surf the Net in HTML and not just text, but rather the fact that it is still a phone and not yet another gadget that has to be connected to a gizmo to work. It combines the functionality of a PDA with your phone, and is small enough to attach to your belt.
The third baby in this trilogy of techno toys is a definite must. It’s not the sexiest of the three but the most practical — the new APC Travel Power.
This little 75W DC/AC power adaptor allows you to travel with back-up and extend the battery-life of your PC, eliminating almost entirely the need to carry extra batteries with you. In fact, you can top it up with the universal power supply via the cigarette lighter in your car.