I didn’t purchase many gizmos last year, most of my discretionary spending went towards modding my car, but at least this year I can report that I did not end the previous year with a huge pile of crap.
- MacBook — Peer 1 paid for it, but I consider it mine. I wish that it had a built-in memory card reader and a couple more USB ports, but overall it’s a great laptop for the money.
- Valentine 1 — If Apple made a radar detector, this would be it. It is the best temporarily-installable rader detector on the market at any price, and while $399 is not terribly cheap, the V1 is less expensive than several inferior competitors. My V1 paid for itself within the first week of ownership.
- Palm Treo 680 — I’ve had the phone for almost 5 weeks. It’s not everything that I’ve ever wanted in a smartphone, but it works pretty well and the voice quality and volume are better than any of my previous smartphones. Since buying it I’m also getting a lot more use out of my data plan, which I mostly attribute to the Treo having a form factor better suited to casual Internet use than my previous MDA and SMT-5600. Earlier this week I had a great “Ah-ha!” moment when I Google’d for the phone number of my neighborhood pizzeria and the phone number was a link that called them! I do wish that Palm would rip-off the dialing interface from Microsoft’s SmartPhone platform; having to choose between dialing from a contact, the call history, or entering a number directly when making a call is lame.
- Canon SD700IS — I purchased mine about 6 weeks before the “new model” tax dropped, and I’ve yet to find a suitable compact horizontal belt case for it, but I love it anyways. Surprisingly the viewfinder has turned out to be one of the killer features for me because it makes it easy to keep a moving subject properly framed in continuous mode.
My loser list for ‘06 consists solely of the T-Mobile MDA. Microsoft’s SmartPhone OS == Awesome, Pocket PC == Crap.
