Some of you may have noticed I've been a bit quieter than usual over the past two weeks. That's because I was visiting family in New Zealand.
In case you were wondering, traveling from Philadelphia to New Zealand takes an awfully long time — about 25-30 hours one way. But thanks to a good book or three and some personal tech, the flights were actually relatively pleasant. And thanks to a light weight mini-laptop that I threw in my bag, I was able to keep up on the latest news and lend Lee a hand in keeping Liliputing up to date from the road while still enjoying the first real vacation I've had in about two years.
I'm back at home now, but I figured I'd give you a little peek into my travel bag. Here's what I took with me for pleasure and business purposes.
Asus UL20A
I decided to pick up this 12.1 inch laptop with a dual core Intel SU7300 processor after testing out a review unit a few weeks ago. The notebook strikes a pretty good balance between price, power and battery life, while offering more screen resolution, processing power, and graphics capabilities than you'll find in most Intel Atom powered netbooks. While I wish the UL20A got better battery life, I've found that with the energy saving features turned on, this laptop can run for up to 6 hours, which is slightly better than my aging Asus Eee PC 1000H. I left that 10 inch netbook at home and took the UL20A with me for working on the road and I was quite pleased with its performance.
Zune HD
I've been testing the Zune HD that NVIDIA sent me for the past few weeks to see how the NVIDIA Tegra platform performs on a portable media player. I figured there was no better test than a long flight. I wound up loading up the media player with 20+ hours of video and over 300 songs. In terms of audio and video fidelity, the Zune HD was excellent. It also got great battery life. I didn't measure the battery performance very rigorously, but I found I could use it for a few hours a day without recharging very often. I was a bit less impressed with the over-reliance on the touchscreen display.
A few hardware buttons for controlling media playback while the device is in your pocket would be nice. I'll have more thoughts to share in a detailed review soon. Meanwhile, you can enter to win this custom (if slightly used) Zune HD from Microsoft and NVIDIA.
Sennheiser PXC 250 noise canceling headphones
The PXC 250 headphones were some of the cheapest over-the-ear headphones I could find, and they do a very good job of filtering out low rumbling tones like the sound of an airplane engine so that you don't have to crank the volume on your media player. In fact, when I flicked on the noise-control circuitry even without playing any audio, the headphones were about as effective at filtering out noise as the set of earplugs I usually carry with me on a plane. The only down side is that these particular headphones aren't all that comfortable and I found I couldn't use them for more than 2-3 hours at a time before my ears started feeling pinched.
Dell Axim X50v
This PDA has been my trusty companion for nearly 6 years. While it might seem a bit dated (thanks to the Windows Mobile 2003SE operating system), the Axim X50v has a 624MHz XSCALE CPU, a 640 x 480 pxixel screen, and can run a whole slew of third party software, which is more than I can say for the Zune HD. Sure, it can't handle HD video, but thanks to the TCPMP multimedia player, it can handle a variety of audio and video formats that the Zune HD cannot. And thanks to the CF and SD card slot, I was able to load it up with 10GB of music, movies, podcasts, video games, and oh yeah, my contacts, calendar events, and tasks.
3600mAh battery for the Dell Axim X50v
When my PDA was first released, it shipped with a relatively low capacity 1100mAh battery, although you cou
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