Gimme..Gimme..Gimme..

So...

I feel more and more like a Luddite these days...

I still have a laptop which weighs about half a ton, is made of pig-iron and runs on coal and steam...

I keep thinking that someday I need to get a new one, if only to retire the mule that hauls it around for me, and I keep looking for that new feature that will finally make me give it all up and buy a new one...

It's a Dell Inspiron 8200 more or less gifted to me by a good friend - and against all odds, it's survived around 3 years with me. I love its 15" screen with 1600 x 1200 resolution - makes it easy to see a reasonable block of code in Emacs or Visual Studio.

So I lied - it was a cutting edge machine in its day...

The real problem is that while it's bulky and really does give my arms a workout carrying it, it is perfectly sufficient for my use - and I do actually write code and stuff on it :)

What I actually noticed is that over the last few months, my travel kit has grown to prodigious proportions with power supplies and adapters of all shapes and sizes, so my next purchases will all try to minimize the number of wall-warts and bricks I need to carry around to stay powered up...

• One laptop from the mesazoic era with its brick...
• Pair of simple headphones and mic for Skype...
• Mobile phone and its wart...
• Bluetooth headset - ok..so I'm not a Luddite after all - and its extension. The extension plugs into the phone's wart so it's not so bad...
• A small point-and-shoot digital camera (for undercover paparazzi work :)) and its charger
• USB Multi-card reader...
• assorted cables...
• assorted adapters to deal with international power socket form factors...
• A small USB web-cam..

Now this is after I got rid of

• The PDA and its charger - my phone does a reasonable approximation thereof
• The CD-player and its charger - my phone plays music in Offline mode, and I can always boot up the laptop...

And I didn't buy an iPod for roughly the same reasons :)

What would be lovely is if the laptop:

• got a lot smaller (yes..that's within reach) and had battery power to last an 8 hour flight (that's OK too)
• could play music without having to have it open and turned on and taking up my tray-table on a flight (the newer HPs do just this - score! :)) and
• have a fast-enough startup time to actually use as a PDA to check flight schedules and things (this should be easy...my antediluvian Dell comes out of "Hibernate" in 12 seconds flat...)

Now...

...if only the laptop could also act as my mobile and use/charge my headset, I could get rid of having to carry my phone on my business trips - my laptop could just be in my backpack as always and I could take calls on the wired or the bluetooth headsets...or heck - just get rid of the wired headset and buy a bluetooth noise-cancelling headband with mic. (Yep - I really was lying about being a Luddite!)

This shouldn't be too difficult to do - the newer cars already have the ability to accept SIM cards and behave like telephones - muting the music and routing the call to the audio system of the car - so why not on a laptop?

So that's what its going to take for me to buy a new laptop...