Cool Gadget!

[Staffbull]

I had a Laguna Initiale and whenever I had my 17" LCD monitor on there was no way the bugger would open let alone start !!

[Mary Fisher]

I had a Laguna Initiale and whenever I had my 17" LCD monitor on there was no way the bugger would open let alone start !!

We've not had any problems with our Laguna ... ?

Perhaps it's too old .... R reg

Mary

[Lobster]

Noooo.... (darling) I meant, as in, "Well in my case, each year the Xmas lights are..."

David

[Helen Deborah Vecht]

Andy Hall typed

No, but I'm fairly mobile at the moment.

I'm a great believer in using every possible trick on cheap mainstream gadgets; My Nokia 3120 is my diary cos I can't write much...

[Lobster]

Sounds interesting: Andy, do you have any pointers for this stuff? Have had a nose around but can't find anything. Just that SWMBO has recently been Blackberry-enabled and am interested to find out what it can potentially do!

David

[Staffbull]

This was a new type keycard thingy, If you want some advice keep your old one!! Mine was brand new (company car) =A322,000 top of the range, in 6 months it had broken down three times a new gearbox fitted umpteen pressure sensors for the tyres and the built in sat nav would fail on me intermittantly !! pain in the asre car

[Mary Fisher]

Shh, dear one, we don't want everyone to know ...

[Mary Fisher]

...

This was a new type keycard thingy,

Ah, yes, I've heard of those.

If you want some advice keep your old one!!

We keep our cars until they die.

Mine was brand new (company car) £22,000 top of the range,

Heavens! We've never had a new car. It would be silly for us, it's just a motorised cart. If I had space for a horse (or ox) we'd have a real cart :-)

in 6 months it had broken down three times a new gearbox fitted umpteen pressure sensors for the tyres and the built in sat nav would fail on me intermittantly !! pain in the asre car

I take your point :-)

Mary

[Owain]

At least the horse would know the way home :-)

Owain

[Mary Fisher]

Always an advantage when you've been, um, refreshing one's self.

Today I read of a company which is applying for a patent for a phone which will (remotely) warm the toilet seat.

That's not a _cool_ gadget of course!

Mary

[Andy Hall]

Typing PDA remote and control as Google keywords will bring up a selection.

Home automation some more.

I have had a Windows CE PDA (an HP One) for some time. This was running the 2003 CE version and was reasonably OK - it has phone, bluetooth, WiFi,IrDA... However, like other WM 2003 devices it doesn't tolerate well having a lot of applications installed and tended to need rebooting about once a day. To put it in perspective, I had TomTom navigator installed on it (to keep taxi drivers honest), "push" email and various other stuff. It was certainly usable although I really wanted to have something that had an integrated keyboard for messaging and email. I also wanted something with 3G capability that could be used as a modem for when WiFi isn't available - e.g. trains etc.

I did look quite carefully at Blackberry. As a business tool, they have become ubiquitous and the email service is pretty reliable as long as one chooses operator carefully. For what it is intended to do, I think it does a good job. The two drawbacks that I noticed was that it is a relatively closed device and there is not as much other software around for it in comparison with WM and Palm; and that quite a lot of people seem to carry a phone and a Blackberry. I wanted one device. I couldn't find any Blackberry remote control software.

So it looked as though WM or Palm would be the choices. WM 2005 had come out and was getting good reviews in terms of stability, so this seemed to become a viable option. I spent some time researching different "push" email solutions and found a reliable one. A discussion about customer retention with my mobile operator brought forth a Qtek 9000 (WM2005 PDA with all required features).

The older PDA is now being relegated to various purposes around the house for control purposes.