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Convergence
August 2nd, 2006 02:51 pmSo, with my iRiver missing in action I've been thinking about my devices again. I like my treo a lot but the battery life is starting to go and I find that I almost never take photos on it because of the poor quality so I have been thinking about replacing that, possibly with the Treo 700p when it finally comes out.
I started off thinking about not replacing the iRiver and just getting some SD cards for the Treo but it looks like the 4GB ones don't work with Treo, which would leave me buying a lot of 2GB ones to fit all my music and not getting that whole random across everything feel which can be so much fun. So then I thought why not trade my current treo for a PDA with a big hard drive and then I could get a little phone with a really good camera on it - Vodafone owe me an upgrade anyway.
Well, I looked and looked but to no avail. You would think that given you can get 60GB into an iPod these days you would be able to buy PDAs with a similar capacity but it seems not. The only one even remotely close was the Palm LifeDrive, which is 4gb and takes 4gb SD cards. Better, but still not great. I think some mp3 players do have organiser functions on but I get the impression that they're generally not very full featured (and I've no idea how you would enter text on them) so I more or less discounted them as an option but if you know of any which are good, do tell!
So the LifeDrive was looking like the best option and I decided to start looking at prices for it and a bunch of SD cards when I found the Samsung Q1. Yes, it's a tablet PC about the size of a paperback book. Another technology purchase I've been thinking about for a while was an ultraportable laptop (mine's very bulky plus old and a bit rubbish these days). 40GB would fit all my music on with no problems (the old iRiver was 20gb) and it has a multimedia mode you can run without booting into Windows all the time. The major downside is the battery life - not bad for a laptop but not great for a portable music player/organiser. On the other hand, it might fit quite nicely with my usage patterns - I can't think of many times when I would want longer continuous use out and about. Plus, you know, tiny! We like tiny. So now I've been spending the afternoon doing sums to figure out if I can afford it because it's making me drool! My technology lust is startling sometimes.
I started off thinking about not replacing the iRiver and just getting some SD cards for the Treo but it looks like the 4GB ones don't work with Treo, which would leave me buying a lot of 2GB ones to fit all my music and not getting that whole random across everything feel which can be so much fun. So then I thought why not trade my current treo for a PDA with a big hard drive and then I could get a little phone with a really good camera on it - Vodafone owe me an upgrade anyway.
Well, I looked and looked but to no avail. You would think that given you can get 60GB into an iPod these days you would be able to buy PDAs with a similar capacity but it seems not. The only one even remotely close was the Palm LifeDrive, which is 4gb and takes 4gb SD cards. Better, but still not great. I think some mp3 players do have organiser functions on but I get the impression that they're generally not very full featured (and I've no idea how you would enter text on them) so I more or less discounted them as an option but if you know of any which are good, do tell!
So the LifeDrive was looking like the best option and I decided to start looking at prices for it and a bunch of SD cards when I found the Samsung Q1. Yes, it's a tablet PC about the size of a paperback book. Another technology purchase I've been thinking about for a while was an ultraportable laptop (mine's very bulky plus old and a bit rubbish these days). 40GB would fit all my music on with no problems (the old iRiver was 20gb) and it has a multimedia mode you can run without booting into Windows all the time. The major downside is the battery life - not bad for a laptop but not great for a portable music player/organiser. On the other hand, it might fit quite nicely with my usage patterns - I can't think of many times when I would want longer continuous use out and about. Plus, you know, tiny! We like tiny. So now I've been spending the afternoon doing sums to figure out if I can afford it because it's making me drool! My technology lust is startling sometimes.
