Ewan Spence takes the road less traveled, and he takes it often. Besides taking part in running All About Symbian, one of the largest community sites for Symbian Smartphones in the world, he’s also one of the people behind OPL, a keystone language (similar to QBasic) for Symbian OS. Not only that, but he’s helped set up FreEPOC as a programming team, and travels the world bringing OPL to the Symbian OS and the casual developer. Ewan brings a decidedly old-school flavor (some might even say retrograde) flavor with his gadget bag, which goes to show that the latest and greatest doesn’t have to supplant the old and reliable. What’s in your Gadget Bag, Ewan?
The Bag Itself: It’s Palm Powered!
Last year’s European Palm Developer conference had them give away this rather cool backpack. There’s an internal padded section for a laptop, as well as the main section, two zipped side pockets, a front pocket with holders for pens, business cards and a Palm itself (substitute another PDA or phone as needed). There are various mesh pockets for things like airline tickets and passports distributed around the insides. It’s comfy to wear, fits in lockers easily and holds all this…
Psion netBook (with WiFi)
So we’ve got a laptop that’s about half the size of your 12″ Mac PowerBook, will happily run for 10 hours on one battery charge, which handles all my online activities (email, web, irc, ftp and blogging), gives me the best keyboard of any device this size for writing on, and has been with me for close to five years. Meet the original Psion netBook.
Okay it’s running the EPOC OS (a forerunner to the Symbian OS in the current smartphones), but that’s a blessing in disguise. No virus worries, instant on, and everything in the machine is solid state. I store everything on two 128mb Compact Flash cards. Sitting in the case is a wi-fi PCMCIA card, along with a VGA-out card for presentations.
Carrying a spare battery (swap out and re-boot time of… oh… three seconds), means the netBook will happily get me to Heathrow airport, across the Atlantic to Chicago, a transfer there, on to San Diego, through baggage reclaim, a taxi to the hotel, and still have charge for an hour of wi-fi connectivity. And that’s doing solid work on the thing the whole time. What’s not to like about a machine like this?
HP 200LX
Everyone needs a backup, and when I’m travelling my backup machine of choice needs to be even more reliable that the netBook. Which means the HP200LX.
Probably the first truly useful pocket computer that was more than an address book and diary, this machine is a small clamshell design, running MS-DOS 5.0. As I keep most of my notes in the netBook in plain text files in a directory structure, there’s no problem dropping the CF into a PCMCIA sleeve so the 200lx can read it. It works the other way as well – the netBook has a DOS 6.22 emulator so I can put the CF from the 200LX in there and have native access on the netBook if required. How’s that for redundancy?
It’s always there, and always ready. When people look at modern PDAs and wonder if they’ll finish a working day on one charge, I have to laugh. The netBook’s time is bad enough, but I expect to change the 200LX batteries after around 60 hours of constant use – or a standby time of around 10 weeks. On 2 AA batteries.
Plus it runs Norton Commander – probably the finest DOS shell in the world, ever.
Nokia N-Gage
Shut up, I like it.
Not for the MMC Games (although the new releases look to be of a much higher quality), but because it is almost the perfect smartphone. Connectivity in these devices is always the key, and in the N-Gage I can send individual files via Bluetooth, pop out the MMC Card and place it in a CF Card Reader… and place that in a PCMCIA Card Reader so the netBook and 200LX have access to the notes.
Plus it’s one of the few (only?) smartphones to have probably the most flexible connection. It’s a USB Mass storage device. Which means it can connect (with a simple cable) to pretty much any computer that I come across, be they Mac, Windows or Linux.
What else is there? An FM Radio. Through the N-Gage I re-discovered again the power of radio while out and about. Central London has a huge density of radio stations, and it’s possible to find pretty much any genre depending on your mood.
It’s programmable by normal people. OPL is a BASIC like language with a very low entry and learning curve; the documentation is here, and OPL has access to all the same features that C++ has – it’s not sandboxed in the same way Java midlets are. I’ve been pretty vocal in my support of the OPL Project, because I believe that you shouldn’t have to spend months learning complicated OO languages just to program your phone.
The associated Internet applications on the N-Gage make it a wonderful portable system. Azure is a mobile blogging client. FTP is available. PuTTY lets me admin the servers at my work from the pub (very important). Sun’s Peek and Pick gives me a mobile RSS Reader. But the ultimate application (probably) is WirelessIRC. With 2-3 hours of chat for the price of a single MMS message, it’s the killer mobile app.
Finally, I like the size of the device. I’m not one for phones the size of pins, I can get good texting speed with my thumb and it just feels right in my hands. And that over-rides style, fashion and side talking!
An original Gameboy Advance (in black)
I prefer the horizontal design of this console, it’s much nicer than the original Gameboy or the Gameboy Advance SP. There’s only really one game you need for the GBA, and that’s Advance Wars. Turn based wargaming has always been something I’ve enjoyed. I never could see why real time versions were so exciting. I want to think, to plot, and not stop and get my tanks to drill for oil in the middle of a warfield.
Swap this out for my EPROM cartridge gives me access to probably the funkiest emulator combination – the Sega Game Gear Emulator. When games didn’t mean flash graphics, but solid game play. And with a SNES emulator, you don’t need to buy all the Nintendo remakes, you can play the originals.
A pair of Electronic Dice
These just scream gadgets. A small motion sensor triggers a random number generator tied to the LED’s on the top of the weighted spheres. With a little tinkly noise. Sheer flippantry. They’re wonderful.
Sony Net MD
I never bought into the whole iPod cult thing (see blog post here http://www.symbiandiaries.com/archives/ewan/001071.html). Again themes of reliability, battery life and practicality come to the fore. One AA battery in a side clip on the machine, plus a spare in my pocket, on top of the internal rechargeable battery gives me over 140 hours of playback time. So while an iPod could get me over the Atlantic, the Minidisc gets me over, through a 7 day trip, and back again.
Being a Net MD, it hooks into a PC through USB to download my music (the same cable as the N-Gage – more redundancy). With compression, a disc can hold 5 and a half hours of music and I can’t tell the tonal difference. So 4 discs can hold 28 decent sized albums (or 35 modern day albums). Three or four of these cover most of my CD collection that I could want, plus there’s a final disc made of my favourite clips and songs from “The Muppet Show.” Strangely, everyone wants a copy of that one…
I’ll mention the headphones, the Sony MDR-W08. This design of headphone (headband and small, in the ear, hard stalks) is a design I’ve used since I was 10. I can’t get bud earphones to stay in my right ear (the left ear isn’t a problem, which is strange), and this design means I get the benefit of little sound leakage, but I’m not building up muscles in the ridges of my outer ear to hold the plastic in place.
A Pack of Bicycle rider back poker cards
52 pieces of card as a gadget? Yes. Have you seen what goes into a good quality pack of cards nowadays? I do a lot of magic, mainly with cards, so it’s important to me to have cards I can trust. And no, they’re not marked. Well, they are on the front, but that’s so you can tell them apart, I’m talking about on the back.
Leather Yo Yo Case and Stupidly Pricey Yo Yo
A two piece yo-yo with a metal axle and wooden sleeve, this yo-yo is one of the best I’ve ever used. I’ve had it for about 5 years, and it sits in a leather holster on my belt.
Barr’s Irn-Bru, 750 ml Glass Bottle
Has to be in glass. Ask a Scotsman.
Bubbling Under
Depending on the trip (or my mood) sometimes the following will get promoted into the bag.
Neo Geo Pocket Colour
I picked up one of these machines and 16 games while on a recent trip to America for about $150. It’s a crying shame this console failed, because it was the equal of the Gameboy Advance, had a 30 hour battery lift, and had the only fighting game you’ll ever need (SNK vs Capcom, Match of the Millennium). There’s a Neo Geo Pocket emulator in the works for the N-Gage, and when that arrives maybe this device’s place in history will be secure.
Nokia 7650
The original Series 60 phone, and still a personal favourite. If this had the MMC slot and the USB of the N-Gage I’d switch back to it in an instant as my daily phone. Good digital camera (but not my main camera), nice form size, and the nicest cursor ‘stick’ on any phone.
Sony Mavica Digital Camera
It’s a big clunky 7-year-old digital camera with a flash. So why is it still in use? Because of two reasons. The pictures it takes are great, and it uses 3 1/2 inch floppy disks as a storage medium. Which means it can talk to pretty much anything, and I can grab more “film” when out and about with ease.
Read [AllAboutSymbian]
