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NOW HEAR THIS!
By Pat Meier-Johnson Probably a dozen or so airline freebie headphones have seen the dreaded inner sanctum of my briefcase and come out a mess. So it doesn't break my heart to plug these flimsly mangled contraptions into the TV jack of the cardio machines at the gym then hand them off to another sweaty news junkie, never to see them again. But the Sennheiser PXC300 noise-cancelling headphones are in a entirely different class. Unlike the typical large noise-cancelling phones that look like earmuffs fit for Nanook, these comfortable phones collapse into a deceptively small, attractive cordura fabric-type zipped clamshell and deliver an impressive range and richness of tones. I've spent most of my adult professional life flying about once a month but confess that airplane noises still make be jump. The Sennheisers sound good and are comfortable as passive headphones, but a flip of the noise cancellation switch knocks out about 80% of the engine roar, passenger snoring and galley clatter and opens up a natural almost floating sound. The AAA batteries last for about 80 hours. For a comparison, I switched to the Thai Airways earphones that in Business Class come with what looks like little shower caps over the ear pieces which made them maybe more hygienic. But they were hissy, distant and flat, and certainly neither more comfortable nor any match for the PCX300's audio quality.. (You'd think that for the price of the business class seat, they'd give you something a bit better, specially considering the eclectic and quite wonderful collection of music available on the Thai Airways in-flight entertainment system.) Incidentally, noise cancelling headphones aren't just for airline seats. The Sennheiser CX700 case snugly holds two adaptors for inflight entertainment: a 1/4" 6.3mm stereo jack and 3.5 mm double mono jack in two elastic loops so you won't be digging around under your seat for them. We wish there were a smart phone adapter as well as I couldn't use it with my Treo without one, but the standard 3.5" jack fits laptops and entertainment devices just fine, meaning Eric Clapton was performing at his very best from my laptop as we flew across the Pacific. Sennheiser PXC300 headphones with NoiseGard™ Advance, batteries included : $219.95, though with some hunting, you can easily knock 30% off that price.
Hotel of
the Future in an Unlikely Spot
This
is Mongkok, literally "bustling corner." Mongkok is the gritty, commercial
district of Kowloon across from the sophisticated skyscrapers of Hong Kong. Once
one of the most densely populated areas on earth with evidence of villages 1000
years ago, Mongkok is a domino assembly of traditional family-run businesses in
run-down buildings. Street after street of fl But what is this. In the midst of the mayhem, looming before us, as if it had just landed from space, rises an aerodynamic, glass and steel complex glinting in the South China sky. MORE Phonefight
at the OK Corral
I stared at the Blackberry and the Treo 650, and back again. I hefted one and then the other, felt my fingernails skid off the rounded keys of the Treo. While the light weight and flat keys of the Blackberry seemed practical, the Treo won my heart. The Treo 650 I have is based on the Palm operating system. By early 2006 future models of this phone will run Windows Mobile and promise to be even faster on the Verizon EV-DO network. Corporate IT managers who are issuing the Treo to their peripatetic workers as a remote email device are looking forward to support just one operating system, but I found no problem working between a Windows laptop and a Palm smart phone. Networks speeds are improving too, and Master Bill Gates claims the future Treos will run at DSL speeds. This smart phone spells freedom. While a laptop meant I could be untethered from my desk, though I'd have to slip in and out of Starbucks to find a little connectivity, this phone frees me from my laptop. It's a phone, it's an organizer. It's a decent little still camera. The video function, well, it's not there yet. I can surf the Web and I can do my email from anywhere over my provider, Cingular's, mobile phone system. That goes for almost anywhere in the world as Cingular merged with AT&T making this the best choice for foreign travelers, so you pretty much can ditch the laptop. I can run Word and Excel. It has a full QWERTY keyboard laid out just like your PC with caps, shift, carriage return, delete, space bar. The numbers are incorporated into that keyboard, so they aren't as obvious as the keys on a typical mobile phone, but then again you have the option of tapping your numbers on the 2" x 2" touchscreen on the Treo or even speaking them. The Treo has a rocker pad that lets you navigate from application to application, from calendar to contacts, from tasks to documents You get a trial version of a voice recognition dialing application by VoiceSignal that is scary it's so accurate. You don't have to pre-program your contact list, but its voice recognition is so good that you just have to say the name of someone in your phone book and the likelihood is that the software will recognize, confirm that number in an accent that's somewhere between Tagalog and Gaelic and then dial that number. Or you can just say a phone number and away you go. It's a very worthwhile $19 if you want to buy it because you'll never look at the keypad for dialing again. But the Treo's real strength is in navigating the Web and doing email. My husband and I had an appointment in San Francisco and neither one of us had taken the address with us. While crossing the Golden Gate Bridge I accessed the Web on my Treo and by the time we paid toll I had found exactly where we were going. And yes. I'm bad. It's tempting to check email while standing in line getting a coffee, or waiting to step up to the grocery clerk. I'm tempted to write and send emails at the slightest provocation. That's why they call devices like this and the Blackberry crackberries. It's addictive. You can synchronize with a provided synching cable, Bluetooth. Outlook appointments and tasks move back and forth with ease. The Palm Desktop provides a decent alternative to Outlook and there's even a little photo editing application to touch up my pictures before saving to the hard drive. There's a myriad applications available online including games. One of my friends takes his Powerpoint files and hooks his Treo to an LCD projector for cross-country business presentations. Add in a 1GB flash memory card and you can store a lot of data on this device. The Treo 650 fits neatly into my handbag and lightens the load as well as the chiropractor bills from lugging my laptop on countless trips. Battery life is good, audio quality is fine. And after some very mediocre mobile phones, I've finally found one that satisfies most all my travel communications and data demands.
I
have always been intrigued by the notion of a do-everything personal device. My
military career (roughly paralleling the heroics of George W. Bush) exposed me
to the M1 steel helmet. The "pisspot" as it was called, was a wash basin,
cooking cauldron, latrine, shovel and, if caught with your pants down, you could
bonk somebody over the head with it. I thought the Swiss Army Knife was a cool idea but I rarely had use for a screwdriver and a corkscrew on the same day. Mine ended up in the "unclassified" drawer in the kitchen along with the half-dead batteries, rubber bands and expired lotto tickets. Same for the PDA. My wife bought one, found it fiddly and a waste of time, and sold it on E-Bay. And, call me strange, but I have always hated cellphones: carried one as only as a necessity. I could never figure out the menus. I panicked the first time someone sent me a SMS message, thinking it was either a virus or a testy message from God, and shut the phone off. Ah, but hope has sprung for this entrenched weekend warrior. I have found a personal device, at least as useful as my old M1 that caused me to reassess my bad attitude. It is, sound reveille: the Audiovox SM5600 SmartPhone. My wife and I were due for new phones and plans from Cingular, which we subscribe to only because we travel internationally and their GSM phones work almost anywhere, better in fact in Delhi or rural Thailand than at home. She bought a Treo 650 (see her review next week) and I bought the Audiovox. The SM5600 is a Windows Mobile Edition phone. It looks like Windows and quacks like Windows, so if you know Windows you'll master it quickly. This little 3.7 ouncer will provide you with a half-fledged shirt pocket PC that does most of the really useful things you laptop does, including Outlook email, a calendar, task lists, web browsing and video. It synchs up flawlessly with your laptop or desktop to transfer you entire contact list including phone numbers and emails. It plays high-quality stereo audio. Add to that, usual phone stuff as a VGA camera and camcorder and voice memo and you have a device that will inspire you to leave the laptop at home. The SM5600 is not for big time email users as it does not have a QWERTY keyboard, forcing you to key in John Wayne-style phrases. If you of "the enterprise" I would recommend the Treo. But its brilliant, color 2.2 inch screen works perfectly for reading email, email newsletters and limited web surfing. Its stripped-down version of Internet Explorer allows you to bookmark web sites and even media. We use it as the modern equivalent of a transistor radio, listening to Connected Traveler Radio in stereo anywhere in the world. The device comes with stereo earbuds and serves as a good MP3 player. We added a 1GB mini-SD card. Not the storage of an iPod, but far more functional and with long battery life, estimated at 140 hours of standby time. I can believe it as I rarely put mine on a charger. It also has an excellent speakerphone, better than the fixed business phone in my office. When driving, I toss the SM5600 in ashtray and it works great. Fashion-wise, this device will easily fit in any pocket without altering your line, if you are blessed with a line. I often carry it in my shirt pocket as it is not much larger than a card case and is virtually weightless. So, what's not to like? The little rocker button navigation system is difficult to use. If you press it wrong it will sent you off in the wrong direction. The keys light up brilliantly in the dark but are small and symbols are slow to key in. The camera shoots rather soft pictures, even though I did manage to shoot a panoramic with it, stitching the photo together in PhotoShop, with good results. Also, once you turn on an application, you have to go to the Task Manager on the menu to shut it off. It may be all right to leave it running but it can slow down your phone. I have put task manager on a voice command so all I do is shout "Task Manager" and up it pops. Sounds kind of weird in a crowd. But, all in all, I love my little Audiovox SM5600: You can't pee in it, you can't whack the enemy over the head with it, but it has become my trusty pal. And unlike my other Windows machines, it has not crashed once.
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Dead
Fossil Okay, I'm a sucker for gadgets and I'm forever making appointments, writing reminders even to the point of scribbling on my palm with a ballpoint pen when a scrap of paper isn't within reach.
So
when I heard that Fossil had taken another stab at a Wrist PDA, a large digital
wristwatch combined with a Palm OS-based PDA, I had to try it. And try it, I did,
in a real acid test-a trip to a tourism conference in Asia. With my husband Russ
and me both trying to remember to-do's from the office back home, there would
be countless opportunities to test this thing. Not only responding to reminders
we input, but writing notes on the face of the watch: entering info from contacts
who had run out of business cards, jotting down directions to post conference
dinners or noting suggestions from the locals on must-see post-conference destinations.
Whew! The Fossil Wrist PDA itself looks very retro, reminiscent of the original black and chrome digital watches, but heck, we're talking about 66MHz processor, 8 MB RAM and 4MB Flash memory and a screen you can write on, right on your wrist. Or rather, I would say my husband's more substantial wrist. This thing is big, let me tell you. But the watch and I were off to a rocky start. Hoping to allay my inevitable boredom with the inflight movie on the way to Asia, I had charged up my Fossil Wrist PDA ahead of time and taken the user's guide and my laptop along. But twice during my initial forays the thing just locked up on me. The hard reset button didn't solve the problem, nor would trying another HotSync session so I had to let it run out of juice (about 3 days on a full charge) and start the entire time/date setup and data download process from scratch. So I ended up watching awful movies and rereading up on the Wrist PDA in the itsy bitsy user's guide. The documentation indicated a choice of watch faces…nice. Sundial? Egg Timer? Big Ben with sonorous bonging sounds on the hour that befits the size of this wrist PDA? No, my choices ranged from a pretty tame classic watch face to an oddly attractive assortment of digital time displays but surprisingly there was no dual time zone display. This seems a silly omission for a device that can be indispensable for the business traveler. With the watch recharged in my hotel room, it was a cinch to set upload my entire Outlook appointments and contacts (a variety of Palm OS applications run on the device easily, they say.) Within a short time I had mastered the buttons, screen input, and danced between calendaring, address book and onscreen input using the tiny stylus quite easily. My reminders beeped at me from the wrist PDA at a hummingbird frequency high pitch with a surprisingly audible range. (One night I had to throw the watch in a closet when its Pacific Daylight Time reminder alarm woke me up in Macau at an hour that I was loathe get out of bed and too sleepy to figure out how to turn the darn thing off.) Sad to say, I had hoped to wear the Wrist PDA throughout the conference and wow the other attendees, but ultimately I found it too heavy and cumbersome. Yet, from my early exercises, there's no doubt I was hooked. There were countless times during the conference I thought how convenient it would be to simply enter a note or a reminder into the watch, or look up a contact's phone number or email with a rock or a tap. If you absolutely have to have one of these Wrist PDAs now, here are some tips: Turning off the default infrared buys back some very precious battery life and it's easy enough to turn it back on when you want to. And don't take any trips without the cables, even if you don't plan to synchronize, as you'll need them to charge up the watch every few days. Never leave the watch off for more than a day as you'll lose all your data and will have to synch with your laptop all over again. (I lost my date and time settings as well.) The watch enjoys a full charge and the AC plug is compatible from 100 - 240V. But as a foreign traveler if you're using a converter to charge your other electronic gear overnight you may find that your laptop doesn't provide enough juice through the USB connection to charge the watch, so it will vie with your other electronics for that plug, making its need for juice even a bit more annoying. Bottom line: While frustrating at first, it is a good start, and for $249 for a gadget-lover with good eyes, a strong arm and a life that's full of details, this Fossil Wrist PDA may be just the ticket. I'll be first in line when they come up with one that's flatter, lighter, with better battery life and fits a more delicate wrist. |
The
pet emporium owner grinned as the chinchilla ran down my arm to his cage, spun
around, lifted one paw, then the other, stroked its long whiskers and posed on
his haunches like some cuddly Pokemon toy.
ower,
bird and ladies garments markets, and wall to wall people blend into a screeching
Chinese opera of noise, fragrances, color and commerce. 
The
Treo 65
VOX
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