Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

I never thought I’d say it, but perfection is getting pretty close. I got a whole slew of gadgets over the last week even as I suffered though a week in NYC. I’ve never had such a list of highly recommended products before. This is for “Jeff Merriman-Cohen”:http://www.merrimancapital.com/ and “Jon”:http://ignitionpartners.com/about/jon_a.asp who asked mre for the perfect products:
* VAIO T140 Notebook (Sony-VGNT140PL). Well, I have to say this is just about the perfect laptop. Weighs just 3.1 pounds, has a 1.1GHz Pentium M processor so is decently fast. Most importantly, it has a beautiful screen (10.4″ wide screen), and a special mode for DVD showing plus a battery life of 5 hours at least. The only drawback I’ve found is that this model has a 40GB drive and 5GB is hidden from users by Sony. They have a strange recovery scheme where they hive off a bunch of hard disk that you can’t use. Yuck. I’ll have to reformat to get those precision bytes back. Right now it is just $1800 at “techonweb.com”:http://techonweb.com
* “iPod Photo”:http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php?masterid=4661488&blsrt=1. This thing is absolutely a ripoff at $500. But it is beautiful. The screen is tiny but very nice. And the user interface is great. I have to say the synchronization for music is great, but it is a bit wierd to use iTunes to synchronize your photos and the UI is really buried. Still, a beautiful product.
* “Etymotic”:http://headphone.com/layout.php?topicID=13&subTopicID=64. They are expensive, but I’m telling you, hold your noise and pay $99 for the ER-6 or $200 for the ER-4. I listened to them for 6 hours on the plane and 1 hour in the gym. It is the single most important thing you can do for listening. Its the speakers dummy.
* “Nokia 6620”:http://www.letstalk.com/product/product.htm/depId_1/pgId_100/prId_26281.htm?trk=HBS09. These are just $99 and on AT&T Wireless, you get EDGE. In Seattle, that means a real 100KBps. While you are at it, get a 1GB “Kingmax MMC001G3S”:http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=4004155 card. Then with the right encoding, you can put 700 tracks on your cell phone and with the “HDS-3”:http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=2439524 headset, you get an iPod experience for just $24/month for unlimited data. Its a steal and the kids just love it. It will of course all get better when you don’t sideload your music but get it over the air.