Pretty good toy

[cute fuzzy bunny]

The wife wanted to take stacks and stacks of baby pictures to work and out and about with her as she's always being asked for pics. She also was wishing for some way to show the videos we're always taking.


The "mini photo album" quickly became a pain in the butt.

After some research, I bought one of the new Dell Axim X30 "Pocket PC's" for $179 shipped on sale. Grabbed a 512MB SD card for $29 after rebate at staples.

Its got a 3 1/2" touch screen, just like any PDA. Has a photo viewer and windows media player built in. It took me about an hour to resize all our photos and re-encode the videos we've been taking with our canon camera and download them to the PDA. Now she's got about 800 photos of the baby, our critters, our wedding, etc, along with many baby videos, our wedding video, etc.

She loves it. Easy to use. Also has all the other goodies like email/things to do/calendar sync, calculator, etc. If you buy the slightly more expensive one with the wireless connection or get an optional plug in wireless module, you can "dial up" a wireless carrier or use a wireless home network to get online. Pretty good way to check a few web pages on the road without dragging a PC.

I've also been pondering a Windows Media Center PC to ultimately replace our pile o' tivo's as they're getting a little long in the tooth. If I do that, I can also re-encode and download an hour or two worth of tv shows to her pda that she can watch during down times at work. Since she works the night shift at the hospital, its often go-go-go for a couple of hours and then nothing for a while.

I'm sure one of my next chores will be to rip a few dozen of her favorite CD's to put on it as well; it plays MP3's and WMA's through a small internal speaker or a set of earbuds.

Havent owned a PDA of any kind before...I resisted the 'palm pilot' mania that ran around my office about 5 years ago. In true John Galt style, I kept a piece of paper in my pocket that I wrote down info on and gave it to my admin to put into my Outlook calendar. Kept a dang paper calendar up until a year before I retired when I was forced to go digital. These things are surprisingly powerful, they've really come into their own.

 

[wabmester]

I've owned a bunch of PDAs, but they inevitably get thrown into a drawer and stay there. The problem is that they're too big for a pocket, and if I'm going to carry one in a backpack, I might as well carry a laptop (which I do).

So, I got a Dell 700m as my PDA-on-steroids. Love it. Not only can it do all the things a PDA can do, but it has a real keyboard, real CPU, real display, runs real apps, etc.

Yeah, it wasn't as cheap, battery life isn't as long, and it weighs a little more, but for me, it's a much more practical solution than a PDA toy.

So, how's the kid, TH? And why is there a pizza on your head?

 

[Spanky]

I am still comtemplating buying a laptap and an MP3 player. I guess I am too cheap to buy them.

 

[yelnad]

My favorite toy is my iPod. I have my entire musical collection uploaded on it and I take it in the car and to work with me. I listen to my favorites all day every day. It makes the work day much more pleasant.

 

[yakers]

yeland, I have an ipod Shuffle and my wife has an ipod mini, great tools/toys. One thing I did was to change my car stereo with a unit that has an AUX imput ON THE FRONT where it should be. Now I can listen to CD quality sound off the ipods, another CD player, a cassette, a mini disk (if I had one) or even from a laptop. We have song collections and books on tape (books on ipod?) for our trips. Now I am thinking of getting the ipod photo as our first grandchild is due shortly but I am not sure 40GB will be enough to hold the pictures I plan to take

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I got the wife a little iRiver 256MB mp3 player thats about 2x the size of the AA battery thats in it, sennheiser earbuds, about $50 after rebates. There are some great deals on mp3 players as long as you can be satisfied with a flash one instead of a hard drive version.

Just keep your eyes on www.fatwallet.com for any good deals. I've seen 1GB sandisk players for <$100.

Yakers - we looked at the ipod photo...problem we had with that and several other similar products is the screen size...they're all about 2-2.5" and thats just way too little. After going to a store and handling a wide variety of "wee computers" we came down to an iRiver personal media player with a 3.5" screen that was about $500 but had a large internal hard disk, but my LBYM leaning wife decided on the $179 pocketpc instead.

Wab...you want to know why theres a pizza on my head? You have some reading to do, my man. Although I have thrown off the coils of the pizza loving gang that made death threats to me and have rightfully rejoined the pancake crowd. In case anyone was wondering.

 

[BUM]

th
a little japanese tea with that bunny?

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Funny you should mention that. After having successfully emptied two diaper genies, washed and refilled a dozen baby bottles, cooked and eaten lunch, and fed the dogs I'm now relaxing and enjoying a huge can of arizona green iced tea...

Ok...wheres the camera...

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

By the way, heres the mp3 player I got the wife. Has mp3, fm tuner, voice recorder all built in. Kinda tiny buttons and the screen is made for 20 year old eyes, but a nice little player. Slightly more than I paid for it, but still in the ballpark. The rebate paid back very fast...just a couple of weeks.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008N6VM/ref=nosim/fatwalletcom/002-0815242-3926420

 

[BUM]

Funny you should mention that. After having successfully emptied two diaper genies, washed and refilled a dozen baby bottles, cooked and eaten lunch, and fed the dogs I'm now relaxing and enjoying a huge can of arizona green iced tea...

Ok...wheres the camera...

No...the bunny, the bunny, the bunny! Bunny's name is Oolong right? After the famous pancake-topper bunny?

BUM

 

[BUM]

The wife wanted to take stacks and stacks of baby pictures

Same with us (all new parents) 30 years ago. " Look this is angel one minute old! Now heres angel a minute and a half old. And just look here angel two minutes old. See how big shes getting?"

Wait till the second one! The first picture MIGHT be kindergarten IF the kid walks in front of the camera while you're snapping another Angel first.

Happy Spring!

BUM

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

In this vein, the other good toy is the new Canon SD300 camera I bought with a 1GB secure digital card.

What a beauty for babies and other impromptu photographing. Its roughly the size of a credit card, albeit a little thicker. Very lightweight, good sized little screen, built in optical zoom, takes great photos and also will take up to 9 minutes of 640x480 video at 30 or 60fps with sound. Yep, it looks 10x better than my old minidv camcorder, and at the 60fps you can analyze golf and bat swings.

The reason for the short video length is actually a good thing...the video is captured as uncompressed .avi files on the PC. Those can be imported into any video or dvd package without grief. I pull them right into windows movie maker for editing.

The only catch is that you need a high speed secure digital card to do video...you dont want the el-cheapo version from walmart. Fortunately the 60x+ speed cards are getting fairly cheap. Camera is selling in the $270 range and a 1GB card can be had for ~$75. Carry it in your pocket, never be at a loss for catching that "look what he's doing now!" stuff that nobody except you will ever care about

My wife LOVES this camera.

 

[BUM]

Hmmmm.. My 5 yr old bulky Sony Mavica w/internal floppy is getting whiskers and my birthday is coming up. But first there is the woodworking bench, a bigger band saw, the outfeed top for the table saw, the gift certificate to the exotic woods website.... start chanting LBYM LBYM LBYM LBYM. No wait I have the money. No you don't! Yes I do! You can't talk to me like that! I can talk to me any way I want!

Ahh, sorry BUM

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Oh my god. I had one of those about...six cameras ago.

This one is a winner. If you dont wanna cough up that much money, the SD-200 (I think its 1mpixel less than the 300) is virtually the same for about $80 less.

 

[Nords]

Mavicas still rock.

Oh my god.  I had one of those about...six cameras ago.

Not only do we still have ours, but some of our diskettes are older than our kid. And some of them are only double density!

Hey, Bum, PM me when you're ready to put that relic on eBay.

 

[BUM]

Re: Mavicas still rock.

Not only do we still have ours, but some of our diskettes are older than our kid. And some of them are only double density!

Hey, Bum, PM me when you're ready to put that relic on eBay.

Mavicas do rock NORDS. I got mine with the optional wide angle lens and the snapshot printer... which is often very handy. You'll be the 1st to know when it goes on the block.

BUM