Tools

Got a color-screen iPod? Rough Guides is providing downloadable “eating and drinking guides to ten of the world’s great cities.”

You might want to pick up one of these babies if you’re looking to totally freak out and confuse the flight attendants on your next flight. Is it merely a watch/camera - or do you have to turn it off on the plane because it’s also a cell phone? They might be so confused that they skip you altogether while doing their pre-flight rounds. Or maybe they’ll just see the antenna and tell you to shut the darn thing off.

I think it looks a lot like the wrist dealie that Leela wears on the now-defunct show Futurama.

For those of you who travel internationally a fair amount, there’s nothing like a good language barrier to make things even more challenging. That’s why I really like Gadling’s intermittent series of posts entitled “Words for the Travel Wise”. It’s a good jumping off point for picking up words in new languages, and you’ll never know when they’ll come in handy.

Today’s word is khintrem, which means please in Armenian.

The Ultra Mobile PC (a.k.a. Origami) has been getting a lot of flak lately from many corners. JK on the Run who - true to his name - is constantly on the go now gives us an impassioned defense of the embattled little device.

I’m curious to hear from our readers. Do you use a UMPC? Do you agree with JK, or with the skeptics?

Mobilemag has posted about the Glocom Neofree battery pack. Charge it up at home and then use it on the road to juice up your small portable electronic gadgets. About the size of a pack of cards, the 4400mAh of power is supposed to be able to provide about 8 hours worth of runtime for a PSP or PMP. Still trying to find a site that talks about how much it costs…

The Lobby has an interesting post on cell phone batteries, which are sort of like the Meghan L. O’Sullivan of modern technology: critically important and seldom recognized.

I, for one, am a big fan of power cycling my cell phone battery regularly, especially when it’s brand new. You’ve got to run that battery down and then charge it all the way up at least three times when it comes out of the packaging. I try to power cycle it at least once a month after that. Plugging it in to the adapter every time you come through the door will only decrease your battery life long-term.

If you’re good at planning ahead, you can check out I Love Free Wifi from your computer before you leave for your destination, so you know where all the free hotspots are located.

And if you’re like me - totally unprepared and running around like a chicken with her head cut off - you can just text the site and get a message back with the locations of the 6 closest hotspots.

Via Travel Post Insider.

When you’re on a business trip to Southeast Asia or South America, sometimes it’s best to avoid drinking the tap water. The last time I traveled to Indonesia, I didn’t even brush my teeth with the filtered water at the hotel.

That’s why this little gadget might come in extremely handy during your next trip abroad. If you stir this little UV wand around in a glass of foreign water, it’s safe to drink in minutes. Just think of the money your company will save on Evian.

Gizmodo has word that a new external hard drive is coming to the market. It has a special sensor that lets it know when it’s about to experience a sudden impact, it then takes automatic steps to protect its key components, reducing the risk of data loss.

I know I’m always dropping things in the airport. It would be nice to know that my data would survive the fall.

Josh Bancroft over at Tiny Screenfuls is looking for a new Bluetooth headset. He’s got some good reviews of a couple of models he’s tried and is looking for more comments. This post could be a good hub for those who are getting into the market for a new Bluetooth device.

Walter Mossberg compares the H-P Compaq NC2400 and the Lenovo 3000 V100. Both are small (4 lbs or so, 12 inch diagonal screen) laptops with DVD drives, and coincidentally cost $1,649 in a full-featured configuration. Here are some key differences he cites:

“Based on “speeds and feeds,” the raw specs of a computer, the Lenovo offers much more than the H-P. But based on the key components of road-warrior mobility — weight, size and battery life — the H-P crushes the Lenovo.”

“The H-P also has a smaller footprint for a desktop or airline tray — 11.1 by 8.38 inches vs. 12 by 8.9 inches for the Lenovo.”

Using his “harsh” battery test (all power-saving features off, and keeping the hard disk working, Mossberg found that the Lenovo’s battery lasted two hours, 41 minutes while the H-P Compaq nc2400 “blew away” the Lenovo with a life of four hours, 27 minutes. Mossberg thinks that in a conservative power usage scenario, H-P could allow you to work for six hours straight without a recharge.

The extra battery life is likely attributable to the slower processor used in the H-P (an Intel Core Solo processor running at 1.2 gigahertz,) but Mossberg didn’t find the H-P sluggish at the “typical, mainstream tasks” he threw at it.

If you have plants, you’re probably accustomed to coming home from a business trip and finding out that at least one of your green things has wilted. Unless you’re totally obsessive about putting those little funnel things full of water in the plant’s soil before you leave, that is.

Of course, there is always the expensive designer option, a flower pot with a built in watering system that allows you to water the plant just once a week. Behold!

Via Gizmodo.

No, we’re not talking about some cute little beast that might be better suited to Cute Overload (if you haven’t seen it yet, go there post-haste for adorable animals of all stripes). We’re actually talking about a tiny little mouse, about the size of an iPod Nano that works with BlueTooth. The device comes from BlueTake and is compatible with both Windows and Macintosh machines.

Via JK on the Run.

For those of you who hate sleeping on airplanes because there’s always some pesky light on, you’ll love this mask. Apparently it looks really geeky when on, but if it’s completely dark, nobody will be able to see you. Right?

Via Travel Post Insider

I’ve actually made a makeshift one of these with an ordinary binder before, but according to the manufacturer, this can stand up to having a Land Cruiser parked on it - which is something I would never subject my binder to.

Why it needs to be that strong we have no idea…

Via The Lobby

It doesn’t operate on all browsers yet, but Yahoo’s AJAX-based Airfare Search does look pretty cool. In a nutshell, AJAX allows a Web page to load content in real-time instead of having to refresh the page in order to see new information like you need to with HTML. This means that you can watch the fare results coming in realtime.

I tested the search engine on three major flights from my hometown for the week of May 11 to May 18 - Seattle to New York, Seattle to Los Angeles and Seattle to Atlanta - and compared it with the results from Expedia and Orbitz.

Orbitz returned the lowest fares for all three flights: $274 with one stop on Northwest Airlines for the New York trip, $198 with no stops on United Airlines for the Los Angeles trip and $302 with one stop on Northwest for the Atlanta trip.

In terms of ease of interface, the Yahoo engine is by far the nicest. But based on my test, it’s still a good idea to shop around on the other airfare engines before making a purchase.

Via Digg.

The Travel Goods Association has named Ricardo Beverly Hills Solutions Travel Luggage Collection as the Winner of their 2006 Product Innovation Award. The luggage features a built-In digital scale. Now “travelers can pack their bags and know that they have not exceeded the standard airline weight limitation” claims Ricardo.

I’ve been spending some time investigating what new services exist to benefit travelers, and am impressed with Skibonk. It’s a mashup of Google maps and a number of other resort-related data services. In one info-rich interface, it provides resort locations, slope conditions, trail maps, webcams, and weather reports. It can also overlay information on lodging and food. I am finding it’s now my portal for following conditions at the resorts I like.

I’ve been using it to keep tabs on the resorts we visited this winter courtesy of coloradoski.com. Looks like Keystone and Copper Mountain are holding up nicely, even late into the season–I’d sure like to fit in a few final runs of the year!

If you like things that are simple, stylish and stainless steel then you may want to pick up this little 24-sided world clock. Each of the clock’s 24 sides is printed with the names of two major cities in each of the world’s 24 time zones. The clock displays the local time at whichever cities are currently pointing straight up.

How cool.

Forget to transfer that important file to your laptop before leaving on your business trip? GoToMyPC can help save the day. From any web browser, you can access your home PC and all your files, programs, network resources and email–even drag and drop files from your desktop to your laptop. You can even print from your home PC to a local printer. Thats cool. Just $20/month (or save 25% on an annual plan). Well worth it for a little peace of mind.

Compared to a similar product, pcAnywhere™, GoToMyPC seems to have the upper hand. pcAnywhere™ charges for live technical support and requires its software to be installed on both the client and host PC (GoToMyPC does not).

Go here for a free trial.