I made two recent gadget purchases.
The first: Just before leaving Taiwan, I bought an iPod photo. 30 GB version. I plugged it into my 12″ iBook (her name is iRene), and within 10 minutes my iPod contained over 1,200 songs (which I’d imported from CDs, over the last year, into iTunes) and 800 photos (imported from a digital camera using iPhoto). Total memory used: 3 GB. Out of 30. Very cool. It was about US $350. It has a color screen, and although it’s only 2″ by 2″, the photos look good on it. For an itinerant guy like me, the ability to carry around my entire music collection (it’s not all in there yet, but it’s coming) and a bunch of photos in a contraption the size of a pack of cigarettes is just too good to pass up.
The second: I recently picked up a Palm Zire 31 PDA. It’s the cheapest Palm makes: 150 bones. Color screen. 16 MB of space. I’ll use it to store my contacts and keep my calendar. My first PDA, after years of resistance. (Why did I resist? I don’t know.)
Finally, on a related note, a few of you have asked for a link to my “Thoughts on the Mac Experience” post, which I wrote after switching from a PC to my iBook last year. Knock yourselves out.