Holiday Shopping: Gadgets and Stuff

Here’s a headline that would have been gibberish not long ago:

Kindle vs. Nook vs. iPad vs. Galaxy Tab: What to consider

My co-blogger will tell you that this is no contest and that the iPad wins hands down. I’m not so sure. iPads are awesome gadgets but this decision rests on (among other things) how gadgety your life needs to be.

As I see it, the argument for the iPad is that this…

must be better than this…

because it can do more.

It’s not a perfect analogy — that monstrous Swiss Army knife doesn’t look like it would fit in your pocket — in which case what is the point, exactly? But say you could fit all those tools into roughly the same space as the smaller knife, weighing somewhat more and costing considerably more.

Why would anyone go for the less-capable tool? Assuming that the weight difference is not a big deal, we’re left with asking why not pay more for tons more capabilities?

Ultimately it’s a matter of individual budget and preferences. I used to own a Swiss Army knife that was somewhere between the two items shown above. To me, what  mattered most about it was that I always had a pair of scissors, a phillips and regular screwdriver, and a corkscrew on my person at all times. I rarely used it for other things, inlcuding — oddly – cutting things with the knife blades. (And given a choice, I would much prefer a real screwdriver to the stunted versions included in the knife, but in  a pinch they would work.)

I speak of my Swiss Army knife in the past tense because I lost track of it sometime after 9/11. Turns out it was much handier on the road than in real life, and if I couldn’t carry it with me onto an airplane, it just wasn’t something I needed all that much. At home or at the office I can usually find a real pair of scissors or a screwdriver (or even a corkscrew), so the handy tool that conveniently combined all those capabilities disappeared from my life.

With all this in mind, I’m undecided as to what my next handy gadget is going to be. I already have an iPhone, and to me it is a Swiss Army knife. I can carry it in my pocket and, in a pinch, do a lot of stuff with it that I would do with a computer if there was one handy.

However when there is a computer handy, I use it. The bigger the keyboard and mouse, the better. I have pudgy fingers and I like big stuff. And while I suppose there might be some inherent superiority of a tablet over a laptop, I still look at an iPad and think, ”Okay, much better keyboard than my iPhone, but still not as good as my laptop.”

So if I were to get a reader I’m not sure I’d make the leap to iPad. I might just go with the Kindle.

What I am getting is a brand new desktop computer — my first  in several years. (What I’m getting is not a surprise as I was allowed to pick it out.) Sure, with a laptop and wi-fi, I can work anywhere in my house or at thousands of locations worldwide.

 Granted. And make no mistake – I’m keeping my laptop!

 But where I’m sitting right now is where I like to be when I write, where I like to be when I work on videos, and where I like to be when I podcast. I’d like to have that all set up all the time, with a big screen and a big keyboard and mouse and the whole works. I’m getting an HP Pavilion which specs out as follows:

It’s not the absolute top of the line, but it’s pretty sweet. And it’s a big step up from my Vaio, which I’ll now be using just as a kind of expanded netbook, with the HP being my command center. Then I’ve got my iPhone for when the Vaio is too much.

It’s all kind of like this:

 (A great bit all the way through, but starts getting relevant at about 2:20.)

So my desktop computer is my BIG PILE OF STUFF. It’s like my house.

The Vaio is like the stuff in the hotel room in Honolulu.

The iPhone is like the stuff I take to Maui for the weekend.

 SoI guess I’m not yet convinced that I need an intermediate stage between Honolulu and Maui. But stay tuned.