Gadget Update

As regular readers of this blog already know, I'm fond of gadgets. Recently, I've spent way too much time pondering a few new ones, and this entry is just to let you know how it all sorted out:
1) Palm Centro - Now that I've had one a couple weeks, I realize that what I really wanted was an updated Palm PIM (Personal Information Manager.) That it can also act as a cell phone is great, but turning out to be a rarely-used feature. It's nice that a Centro or Treo 755P with suitable data plan can do lots of cool things via Internet access, but now that I've gone without a while, and thought seriously about how much extra I paid for that data access, I may never bother with it again. Skipping it is saving us at least half our monthly cost of service. Further, unlocked and pay-as-you-go is absolutely the only way for me to go - not only is it the only way you can buy a Centro without being forced to also get a data plan, it also simplifies and clarifies the per minute cost of each call. One side effect is that I no longer use my cell# for work, which surprisingly has not been a problem at all.

Kudos to Sprint, which just re-instated the right of its customers to change plans without extending their contract period. That's how they've kept me as a customer for the Middlewife's Centro. Turns out I could put my drowned Treo 755P on a vacation plan for the remaining year of its contract, and switch our Sprint Centro (which is not on contract) to their basic plan with no data plan and cut our bill to a third of what it was before. That eliminated any desire on my part to buy another unlocked Centro and terminate the Sprint contract early. Having service from both Sprint and T-Mobile also improves our odds of having at least one working phone wherever we are.

2) iPhone 3G - As a result of the above realizations, I no longer have any interest at all in the forthcoming new iPhone 3G. Maybe some day if I can get an unlocked one for a fair price and use its data features via pay-as-you-go it will be of more interest, but for now, the Centro meets my needs. Realizing AT&T's pay-as-you-go plan costs twice as much as T-Mobile's, for no obvious reason is another reason not to switch.

3) OLPC XO - We've just gotten back our One Laptop Per Child computer, and have now updated it over the Web. That turned out to be both easier and harder than expected. Several things I tried failed (particularly updating from a memory stick loaded by my desk PC), but in the end updating turned out to be a simple matter of entering a few weird lines of Linux commands on the XO itself. Next week we take the XO out to Shades to be our grandson's first computer. The XO is really designed for kids a lot older than 9 months, but hey, Shades was precocious too.

Sadly, OLPC seems to be selling out now to Microsoft, which is really sad news for the children of the third world who might otherwise have more easily escaped the Microsoft monopoly. But the original XO will always be a keepsake, right alongside our Tandy 100, the first actual laptop computer. (Ours is the "premium" version, with 32K of RAM, and an 8 line 40 character LCD screen, all running on AA batteries. We actually wrote a book on that puppy one summer many years ago.)

4) EEE PC 901 - Got one of these on pre-order from Amazon, in the Linux flavor. It's even smaller than the XO, and can run both Linux and Windows XP (after I also install the latter.) My hope is that it will be good enough to be my only computer when traveling, and cheap enough that I won't have to fret about it like I do the office laptop when I carry that along. Initially, I plan to try going without XP on it, but it's nice to know the option exists, if it proves to be necessary.

Update:
Changed my mind on the EEE PC 901. Instead, I ended up getting the slightly-larger EEE PC 1000 model instead. So far it's working extremely well.