Ordinary Gweilo

I found this article about the ‘gadgets of the year” in The Guardian. I’m not really a gadget freak, but I am interested in what is coming along and I normally wait until prices drop before I actually buy. Today I bought a webcam (mainly so that my son can use it to talk to his cousins) and I was amazed how cheap it was and how easy it was to set up.

My only weakness has been PDAs. I have bought a couple of Psion Organizers, a couple of Handspring Visors, and a couple of Handspring Treos, each time upgrading to a newer, faster, cleverer machine. The Treo is very useful in that combines PDA and phone functions (though it’s only an average phone). Probably my favourite application is Mobipocket, which enables you to view websites off-line – it’s better than Avantgo in that it has less restrictions and seems more reliable, but someone has to write a small script for each website. With cheap GPRS plans available in Hong Kong, the built-in browser (Blazer) is also useful.

My theory on PDAs (and many other gadgets) is that the vast majority of them are not used to anything like their full potential. It must have seemed like a great idea at the time they bought the item, but in practice people either don’t need most of the features or don’t know how to use them.

One gadget concept that I am watching with some interest is “pen computing”. My ideal scenario is to be able to write on ordinary paper and have the words turned into editable text with any diagrams etc. also incorporated into the document. So far most of the available systems fall some way short of that ideal, usually falling at the first hurdle by being unable to turn handwriting into text. What is frustrating is that some products appear to do more than is actually the case, so you have to be careful to check what they can really do. This company has some interesting software that could help a lot in this area (and they already have a simple handwriting recognition program for the Palm OS).

Keyboards are fine for many things, but there many situations where it would be much more convenient to be able to write discretely on an ordinary pad of paper: it seems impolite to be tapping away on a keyboard in a meeting and it is not always possible when travelling. Eventually they will be cheap enough and reliable enough to be a practical solution.