I just came back from spending three weeks in Europe, loaded with a suitcase full of the latest technologies. A variety of vendors were kind enough to provide their latest wares for our real world testing. The field included Garmin's latest portable GPS, Palm's new TreoTM 680 smartphone, digital cameras from Casio, Olympus, and Canon, a Bose noise canceling headset, a variety of photo editing software tools and a myriad of connectors, adapters, chargers and supporting gear.
From Zürich to Venice to Lake Como, winding past the leaning Tower of Pisa through Florence we rigorously tested this gear to find the best for the traveling speaking professional and my recommendations are outlined below:
Portable GPS - For those of you that have attempted to navigate the roads in a foreign country (or here in the U.S. for that matter). Florence proved to be a worthy testing ground for our Garmin GPS. This beautiful city, sitting on the water's edge seems to be the perfect model for the latest video racing games. Nowhere have I seen so many small cars, battling it out with an unlimited supply of motorcycles, bicyclists and pedestrians all converging with little to no instruction on streets barely narrow enough for your average pizza carrier.
To compound this, it was extremely difficult to read the Italian street names. Our Garmin Portable GPS was a lifesaver; it fearlessly took us to every major attraction that we wanted to visit.
The touch sensitive screen was extremely easy to use and calculated and recalculated routes with blistering speed. We were even able to reprogram our destinations while in the room, and then select them from a list when we were ready to go. The only time that it gave us difficulty was when navigating through areas with road construction, as this information is not known to the system. We ran into this same situation in the states when traveling around Boston's Big Dig area. Although it had difficulty pronouncing some of the Italian street names, the unit worked like a charm. Its voice prompts were accurate and timely and its ability to display the mileage to the selected destination along with an estimated E.T.A. kept us from worrying about whether we had gone too far. It was so helpful that we learned to regret the couple of times that we ignored its advice because "we thought that we knew better." Without it, we would still be in Italy eating pizza and Gelato
For this trip we chose the Garmin StreetPilot® C550. This particular model can be plugged into the cigarette lighter or operated on its rechargeable battery. It has a variety of other outstanding features including an MP3 player and a portable windshield mounting system. Whether you bring your own from home, or obtain one from the car rental agency, a GPS unit is an absolute must have!
When shopping for GPS, look for an easy-to-read screen, a simple menu system, fast response times and quality support. Additional features include real-time traffic reports, automatic routing of multiple destinations, and one of the newest features - mobile access to movie theater show times and other local information. Although I prefer the Garmin units, there are a variety of suppliers including Tom Tom, Magellan, Mio, and LG priced from $200 to over $1000. Oh yes, and one more thing. If you're traveling to Europe, make sure that you have the European maps loaded on your system. These are generally an extra cost option. I also highly recommend local travel guides, which are available for many of these units that highlight additional attractions, gas stations points of interest and other relevant topics.
Compact Digital Cameras Fortunately; there is no shortage of choices in this arena. When selecting the appropriate camera for your needs the traveler should look at a number of key criteria. These include size, feature set, image quality, ease of use, start up time, screen size, optical zoom magnification, battery type and of course price.
If you're looking for a small camera that will fit in your pocket without making a bulge, then check out Canon and Casio's latest offerings. They are pocket sized and packed with features. The biggest downside is their ability to take indoor pictures using a flash. Their meager flash units just don't have the range and power to light up more than a short distance; however our outdoor shots and indoor close-ups came out great.
For a high quality camera, that's a little bit bigger, yet loaded with manual and automatic functionality galore, then check out the Canon G-7. In our tests, it consistently took the highest quality pictures of any camera of this size and was very fast and easy to use.
If the zoom is your most important factor then check out the Olympus SP-550 UZ. Its 15 times optical zoom is unbeatable and its picture quality is quite good. We considered taking a digital SLR, which definitely has the ability to take superior pictures, however, ruled it out based on size and weight limitations. All of these cameras feature digital image stabilization, which I highly recommend.
Photo Recovery Software - Have you ever-lost pictures or data because a removable media card or external storage device has gone bad? After testing a number of software products we were able to recover all of our pictures that were stored on an SD card that couldn't even be read by Windows Explorer. The software that came to the rescue is a $39.95 package from LC Technology International called Photo Recovery for Digital Media. It is available for PC and Mac users and can be purchased directly from their website at www.lc-tech.com. They offer a variety of recovery products for different purposes, so make sure to pick the one that suits your needs.
By the way, this entire article was dictated using voice recognition software running on my laptop. Next issue we'll review the details along with other Essential Tools for the Mobile Speaking Professional.
To be continued.
If you have interesting tools or techniques that you would like to share, I'd really like to hear about them. Please contact me c/o:
David Larner
9420 Reseda Blvd. Suite 610
Northridge, Calif. 91324
(818) 986-7200
Or email Speaker@pacbell.net