At last, I'm in the air, with most of my gear stowed in an overhead bin. But I've got one tool stashed in my shirt pocket - the REX Pro, from Franklin Electronic Publishers. It's the latest version of REX, the popular, credit-card-size personal digital assistant. It holds my itinerary, plus all of my contacts and appointments, which I've downloaded from my desktop computer.
The most significant new feature of the REX Pro is that users can add, delete, or modify data. Just enter or change an appointment, a contact, or a To Do item using the Starfish SuperKey Light Data Entry System (the operative word here being "light"). Entering anything longer than a few characters, however, is more bother than it's worth, since you must scroll through a screen of letters and numbers and then select each character separately.
As I'm skimming through my itinerary, the guy sitting next to me starts coughing - he sounds as if he's got a hair ball lodged in his throat - and doesn't let up. So I pull my Sony MDR-NC5 Noise-Canceling Headphones out of my carry-on bag and plug them into my Sony MZ-R50 MiniDisc Player/Recorder. The headphones contain two tiny microphones that pick up ambient sound, along with a noise-canceling circuit that works to silence my seatmate's hacking. Road warrior? If I hadn't packed the headphones, I would have been road-weary when I arrived in Minneapolis.
Coordinates: $229.95. REX Pro, Franklin Electronic Publishers, 888-739-6400, www.franklin.com; $99.99. MDR-NC5 Noise-Canceling Headphones; $399.95. MZ-R50 MiniDisc Player/Recorder, Sony Electronics, 800-222-7669, www.sel.sony.com
The moment we land, I dash to the hertz counter before most of my fellow passengers have deplaned. As I trek through the terminal, my Beepwear pager watch goes off. An alert flashes on the watch's LCD screen: "1 new page." I press a button, and a message scrolls across the bottom of the screen: "We've got clearance to photograph in the airport, but call me for details - Emily." The message is from Emily Crawford, one of Fast Company's senior designers.
The Beepwear pager, the product of a joint venture between Timex and Motorola, looks like an average watch, except that it's a bit bulkier. It has all the functionality of a typical sports watch, including an alarm, as well as alphanumeric, numeric, and voice-mail paging capabilities. The Beepwear watch is also fairly inconspicuous - which is perfect for people like me. I refuse to wear an ordinary pager, because I don't want to look like a geek.
Coordinates: $129 plus paging service. Beepwear, Beepwear Paging Products LLC, 888-727-2931, www.beepwear.com
Time to prep for my presentation. The meeting takes place at 4 p.m. in the offices of gofast.net, an Internet-service provider for businesses, located in downtown St. Paul. There's just enough time to print out my slides, to get copies made at the hotel business center, and to check email. So I fire up my Hewlett-Packard OmniBook Sojourn.
Weighing in at just 3.2 pounds, the Sojourn is designed for on-the-go people who want the power, but not the bulk, of a multimedia desktop machine. The laptop's price includes a two-year warranty: If the Sojourn has a meltdown, HP will ship a replacement unit to you by the next business day. The laptop boasts an extra-large SVGA screen, a 233-MHz processor with MMX technology, and 64 MB of RAM. The machine also has a full-size QWERTY keyboard, although I found that I needed to use a little extra oomph to hit each key - which slowed down my typing.
I've also packed a multimedia expansion slice, which comes bundled with the Sojourn. The slice attaches to the bottom of the laptop, adding less than an inch to the machine's thickness and just 2.8 pounds to its weight. And the attachment's features - including a 24X CD-ROM drive, a floppy-disk drive, and dual stereo speakers - are worth the extra bulk.
I packed the multimedia slice because I knew I would need a parallel port to connect my Canon BJC-50 portable color printer (the notebook also has a built-in USB port). I'm used to a desktop printer, so the Canon portable seems as if it were stuck in the slow lane: It delivers two four-color pages per minute and five and a half black-and-white pages per minute. But I'd rather tuck this 2.1-pound printer into my computer case than lug around reams of hard copy. Plus, when I pop in a small optional cartridge, the BJC-50 doubles as a scanner. That said, there is a downside: Unless I make room for the bulky optional sheet feeder, I can feed the printer only one page at a time, so it's not ideal for printing long reports.
Once my print job is done, I get online to check my email. I use the 3Com Megahertz 56K Modem PC Card, which comes with a pop-out telephone-jack connector. The modem isn't as speedy as a T1 connection, but it's the next-fastest thing. The card is compatible with an Apple PowerBook and can transfer voice data, giving motormouths like me the option of adding telephony features, such as caller ID or a laptop telephone-answering device.
Coordinates: $4,999, including multimedia slice. OmniBook Sojourn, Hewlett-Packard, 800-752-0900, www.hp.com; $349. BJC-50 portable color printer, Canon, 800-652-2666, www.ccsi.canon.com; $269. Megahertz 56K Modem PC Card, 3Com, 800-638-3266, www.3com.com
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