TEAM Zarate Tarrani Notes From the Field

Linda's CES report got me thinking about the number of gadgets I have laying around - many of which don't see much use. Two of my monuments to impulse buying are my Jornada 545 and Jornada 680. I use one or the other when I'm on a project that is filled with meetings, action items and the such, but neither are integrated into my daily life. In fact, last May I bought a ThinkPad X20 to replace the PDAs, and lately I've been using it as a laptop while my Sony F580 sits untouched.

I think I've finally learned my lesson with Sony - I've had 3 Sony laptops, 2 of their Vaio desktop systems, their first digital camera and a few other Sony products. Here's the lesson: they charge a premium price for less than premium quality in my experience. Each of the desktop systems had issues within a year of purchase, and two of the laptops developed power problems in less than a year of ownership, as did the digital camera. Worse, my F580 succumbed to the infamous keyboard problem that manifested itself on my laptop with a non-functioning left shift key. My conculsions are:

1. Sony products are overpriced.
2. Sony does not know how to engineer power supplies.
3. I'll avoid buying Sony in the future.

That said, I was more than a little tempted by the newest Sony digital camcorders, one of which uses the Memory Stick technology that Linda wrote about. If you wish to ignore my caveats about Sony you might want to check out the Sony DCR-IP7BT camcorder. It's slick ... it's tempting ... it's not for me.