GearWERKZ TechBlog

Delayed Trip Report from 03 December

This trip was short, so there is not a lot to report. Gadget loadout was as follows:

Laptop: COMPAL IFL-90
DAP: iPod Nano (3G, fatty)
PVP: iPhone
Cell Phone: AT&T Tilt
Digital Camera Pak: Sony Alpha a350 plus 50mm FFL Lens and 75-300mm Med Range Telephoto plus Sony DCS-S750 Point-and-Shoot
Bag: CompuDayPack

I did not get to use the camera (the dSLR) at all, which is a shame. I hate taking a trip to carry the camera, and being forced to travel with the CompuDayPack, and then not even getting to use the camera at all. I did snap some photos with the S750, but most of those were in the course of work. Oh, well. Spilled milk.

Follow up:

The Tilt, as usual, continues to perform from well to superb. I honestly am not sure what I did before this phone, but whatever it was, I certainly did not do it with with the efficiency and power that this phone brings to the fight. I used it a great deal for GPS navigation on this trip, as our hotel was about 30 miles from JAX International. While my continued use of GPS has proven the prudence in making the investment in a dedicated GPS device, I will regret losing the fit that my Tilt currently leverages to occupy this use-space. I’ve also chosen to use my phone cam on a few instances with this phone, which is really the only time I have routinely used a cell phone cam. Most importantly, the Tilt does not force me into the frustrating experience of emailing locally stored photos to email recipients like the iPhone does. Transmitting photos via the Tilt, using either email or MMS (another function the first-gen iPhone does not do), is silky smooth. In fact, while I routinely have issues getting the iPhone to transmit email, I can not remember ever having a problem with the Tilt, once I had gone through the initial pains of the first email setups.

I honestly did not get the chance to use the iPhone for anything more than an alarm clock on this trip.

The trip’s game-ball goes to the IFL-90. While it is a seemingly innocuous task, I give high marks to a machine that is comfortable to work on while I am blogging, which I have done a good chunk of on this trip. I also carried the XPS M1330, but used it in the course of work, so will offer no report on its performance. I spent the time flying and transiting the airports with the IFL-90.

I have honestly not travelled much with this machine. I think the most prevalent machines on travel this year have been the Gateway P-6860FX and the MacBook Pro, which is also due up for travel on my next trip (although I am having much trouble determining what that trip might be). I sometimes forget what a great machine it [the IFL-90] can be. It was up for an upgrade to a 320GB hard drive just before my car decided to eat that money. Still, I currently have about 30GB of free space which is enough for me to feel like I am not cramming the machine to its performance margins.

This machine runs Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit. It is somewhat hampered by a screen resolution of only 1280 X 800, while the Gateway and the MacBook Pro sport 1440 X 900 resolutions (the same as my 19” desktop monitors at home). Still, the display is pretty sharp, offering the brightest picture of any of my laptops when they are dimmed in Power saver mode. Due to the (relatively) limited display real-estate, I do not run Windows Sidebar on this machine. Off-angle viewing creates problems in the vertical, such as when I can not position the display far enough away when crammed between airplane seats; I then have problems seeing the bottom areas of the screen, like the SYSTRAY or the bottom of a Word Doc as I am writing. Outside of those issues though, I was reminded on this trip how good the display is, and it certainly exceeds the display of the XPS M1330 and the Toshiba M305 I use to run LINUX.

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