Here are my daily drivers:
- iPhone 3G
- iBook G4
- Seagate FreeAgent 500GB
- iPod nano 3G 8GB
- Canon SD750
- Eee PC 701
- Western Digital Passport 250GB

iPhone 3G: I absolutely love my 16GB white iPhone 3G.  My iPhone is my lifeline, my entertainment, and my productivity wrapped up into a sleek, small package.  It’s my most recent tech purchase and is already one of my absolute favorite pieces of gear.  I use my iPhone for email, light web surfing, reading my RSS feeds, jotting a quick idea into Evernote, keeping up with my busy calendar, communicating on Twitter, reading eBooks, listening to music, and of course making phone calls.  The 2.1 firmware upgrade has given me a great boost in battery life and I have never had a problem with 3G coverage and call clarity.  It’s the best phone I’ve ever owned.  I’ll talk about my favorite apps and iPhone features in another upcoming post.

iBook G4: I am still rocking my trusty and beloved iBook G4, which I purchased in March of 2006.  I’ve maxed out the RAM and it runs Leopard quite happily.  Right now, the iBook has a hinge issue which makes opening and closing the laptop very precarious, so it’s being utilized as a desktop rather than a laptop.  I have a 19″ HP LCD monitor and a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse hooked up to it, while it is stowed out of sight on the small set of drawers that slide under my desk.  I also have my all-in-one HP Printer, external DVD burner, and external hard drive hooked up to the iBook via a USB hub.  I am looking to eventually replace it on the desktop with an iMac, and I plan on getting a MacBook Pro hopefully sometime this winter, but the iBook is still a solid machine for my needs at home.  I use it for work (Microsoft Office and email), converting videos to watch on my iPhone, web surfing, writing, and some web design.

Seagate FreeAgent 500GB: This is a recent purchase that replaced a 250GB external drive that went out on me.  Because the iBook only has a 40GB hard drive, having an external drive is essential for me.  My husband and I have a large music collection that lives solely on the external drive, as does our iPhoto library.  I have the Seagate partitioned in half–one partition for Time Machine backups, and one partition for music, photos, movies and other things.  I am setting everything to back up to my Amazon S3 account so that if the external ever goes out again, it will not be an emergency!  One of the things I like about the Seagate is its power-saving function–when the laptop goes to sleep, so does the external drive.  That will really help lower wear and tear and increase the longevity of the drive.  It has excellent read/write speeds and looks kind of like a menacing orange Cylon.  Who doesn’t love having a Cylon on their desk?

iPod nano 3G 8GB: My “nano fatty” is one of my all-time favorite iPods.  After seeing the leaked specs, I was prepared not to like it when it was introduced last fall, but after seeing it in person, I fell in love.  It’s so small and sleek that sometimes I lose it in my bigger bags!  It has an incredibly long battery life, and the solid-state hard drive makes it perfect for working out with.  I’ve been using my iPhone a lot lately, but my iPod will not be tossed into some dusty drawer and not used any longer.  I keep it in my purse loaded up with music and audiobooks for my workout and my commute.  I like to keep different music on my iPhone and my nano so that I’m getting more leverage out of both devices.  It’s working great so far, I just need to build my music collection back up after a major hard drive crash!

Canon SD750: I really enjoy using this camera–it has a large, crisp LCD screen, uses SD cards, has a rechargable battery, and takes great photos!  My old camera, the Canon A510, was bulkier and difficult to fit in a smaller purse or a pocket.  The SD750 fits easily in my pocket or purse, which makes it handy for capturing moments on the go.  I’m still playing with the custom CHDK firmware that I loaded on it a while back, so watch the blog for an SD750 update!

Eee PC 701: “Netbooks” are becoming increasingly popular, with new ones popping up on the horizon every day or two.  I am happily rocking the one that started the craze, the Asus Eee PC 701.  I’ve got the 4GB version in Blush Pink, which makes it not only the smallest laptop I’ve ever owned, but also the cutest.  I have upgraded the RAM to 2GB, supplemented the 4GB SSD drive with an 8GB SD card, and added a Kensington USB Micro Bluetooth Adapter.  I am able to carry it almost anywhere in almost any bag I own because it’s so light and small.  I bought it with the intention of using it as a lightweight writing and blogging tool, but it’s so much more than that.  I have gone for days without using the iBook because I just don’t need to–I can do almost any computer task that I need to do on my little pink powerhouse.  I’m running Ubuntu Hardy Heron and it works fantastically well on the Eee PC.  I’ve become a big Linux fan because of this little laptop.

Western Digital Passport 250GB: Since the Eee PC only has 4GB (12GB if you count the SD card!) of storage on board, I thought it’d be nice to get a small external drive for bigger files and backup storage.  So, I picked up a 250GB Western Digital Passport drive (also in pink) that is not much bigger than a deck of cards.  It runs completely off USB power, eliminating the need for a separate power source, and it’s so quiet you can hardly hear it run.  My entire mobile computing setup weighs less than 3 pounds and fits in my purse–how cool is that?

A lot of people have a tech bag or two that they use to cart all their stuff around in, but I stick mainly to purses.  Just because I like electronics doesn’t mean I can’t carry them fashionably!  I favor Coach leather bags for my every day and professional use, but I do have a great Manhattan Portage bag that I use for travel, the gym, or places I just don’t want to carry a nice, expensive leather bag.  I have the Mini Map Bag in pink, which is essentially a vertical messenger.  It’s great for weekend jaunts to the lake or a trip to the coffee shop to write–it easily fits my Eee PC and accessories, plus my wallet, iPhone and other essentials.  It is also big enough to stash my current knitting project, a book, and my DS Lite.

What are your daily drivers and how do you carry them?  If you’re interested in being featured in My Daily Tech, send me an email at jessicafritsche at gmail dot com.

I’ve considered the T-Mobile Wing (aka the HTC Herald) quite a few times since it was introduced into the T-Mobile lineup, but never bit the bullet despite the temptation.  When I found out that’s what I was getting on loan, I was pretty excited to be able to try it out.  I love HTC devices, and so far this one has NOT disappointed me!

Let’s look at what the Wing is packing under the hood:

• TI OMAP 850 201 Mhz processor
• 128 MB ROM
• 64 MB RAM
• Talk time of up to 4 hours
• Standby time of up to 6 days
• 2.0 megapixel camera
• MicroSD slot
• Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
• Slide-out QWERTY keyboard
• Windows Mobile 6 Professional

My JAQ3 was running virtually the same processor, but it never felt as fast and responsive as the Wing does.  Programs that took up to 20 seconds to open on the JAQ3 open in just a few seconds on the Wing, and since I’ve had it, I haven’t had to soft reset the device once.  I was resetting the JAQ3 4 or more times a day at the end.

I can also see a huge difference on battery life using the Wing as well.  My typical usage during the day has the device checking my GMail and work IMAP accounts every 10 minutes, syncing my calendar via GooSync a few times, syncing my tasks via Milksync once every 4 hours, and talking for anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours.  I also fire up uBook to read an eBook quite a bit.  I’ve only seen the battery drop down below 50% when I’ve done all those tasks PLUS read an entire eBook.  That’s pretty impressive, considering I have grown used to constantly having a charger or mini-USB cable on me at all times, just in case the JAQ3 runs out of juice!

I grew quite used to the QWERTY thumbboard on the JAQ3, and while it had a really beautiful, clear screen, I often wished that it was bigger.  The slide-out QWERTY keyboard on the Wing seems like the perfect answer to that wish–the screen is large, clear and bright, and when I need the keyboard I can just slide it out.  The screen auto-rotates when the keyboard mechanism is engaged, which is a nice touch.

The JAQ3 was a slightly buggy device that I hoped would be fixed by a Windows Mobile 6 upgrade that was promised but never delivered.  I can only imagine the things it might have fixed…the Wing runs flawlessly on the newer OS.  Programs that never quite worked right on the JAQ3, like SPB Phone Shell, are working in ways I never thought they could on the Wing.  For instance, I have a black list set up in SPB Phone Shell to block random 1-800 numbers that call me from time to time.  On the JAQ3 it would work sometimes, but not all the time.  Numbers on the blacklist would still ring through or shoot to my voicemail.  On the Wing, I never get a single blacklisted call.  Video also works perfectly on the Wing, whereas on the JAQ3 it was laggy, would only play in portrait mode (read: sideways) on the JAQ3’s landscape-oriented screen, and you could only play video in Windows Media Player, which has never been my choice for mobile video.

The call quality on the Wing is on a whole other level from the quality of the JAQ3.  My poor friends and family have put up with a buzzing noise over the line for the last year and a half, and I know they must be happy to be free at last!  I actually have to turn the volume down on the Wing–on the JAQ3 I had to keep it cranked up to the highest level to hear my calls clearly.

Data on the Wing works without a hitch–the JAQ3 worked great at first, but the longer I had it, the spottier the data connections seemed to get.  I rarely connected on EDGE, even though I was in the middle of the T-Mobile EDGE network, and the data connection would drop intermittently, as would my signal.  I would have to reset the phone to get it to pick the signal or the data back up again.  It was so frustrating, but I dealt with it because it was just too convenient to have my PDA and my phone all in one device.

I’m looking forward to moving on to the iPhone a great deal, especially now that the App Store is open, but in the meantime I’m really enjoying one last month with a great Windows Mobile device.  If you’re on T-Mobile and looking to pick up a solid PDA phone, I highly recommend the T-Mobile Wing. I give it 4 out of 4 DTD stars!