[mogui]

Actually I was thinking of the Nokia N800 or the Palm TX. I had seen the Sony Vaio UMPC in a Sony store in Kunming. I was put off by the tiny characters on the small but brilliant screen. I was afraid the N800 would give me the same problem. I had faith that the TX would be usable because I have a Palm history. I have an ancient TRGpro that I was using for reading, and I had another Palm (a M125) waiting for me in the US, whenever I could get there.

I was not stuck for reading appliances. The TRGpro is sensitive to lighting conditions. I find myself constantly tilting it to get the best display contrast. I consider the backlighting unusable. Nontheless, I did a lot of reading on it. I also had an MP4 player that would display text files on a 24 character wide display. That was actually quite good, as it had adequate backlighting.

There are no good reading devices in Kunming. I took a China Eastern flight to Shenzhen where I looked around a bit. My friend Yoyo distracted me with Korean food and exotic coffee shops, so I did not get much shopping done.

I took the KCR train to Hong Kong and got off at Tsim Sha Tsui, The shopping was great, but I had questions. I saw PDA's with the Palm logo that were labeled Palm Tungsten, but were obviously something else using that name. I was offered more Rolex watches on the street than Rolex ever made. There were other offers too.

I bought a real paper book in the Hong Kong airport and flew to Taipei. The airport shops in Taiwan had loads of electronics, but the Taiwanese money had so many digits in it that it gave me a headache.

I flew to Vancouver on China Air. The food was quite good. A nice stranger gave me a Wilbur Smith paperback. I was seated next to a pretty blonde Australian girl, so I didn't read much. The earplugs in our seats didn't work, so we couldn't watch the movies. The food was quite good.

My daughters were going to meet me in the Vancouver airport. I boarded my transatlantic flight out of Hong Kong at 10:25 Sunday morning. I arrived in Vancouver at 9:30 Sunday morning. Who would have thought? I had told my daughters I would arrive on Monday. I had to take a bus.

I looked around the Seattle area. CompUSA was closing business, so I looked for bargains. I found a prepay Tracfone for US$12. I bought it. They offer international calling at no extra fee. I could call China for only airtime charges!

I drove my daughter's Prius to Portland. It is the most high-tech car I have ever seen. I carried the rf-tag key in my pocket. The car recognized me and allowed me to open the door and start the engine with a PC-like on/off button on the dash. When I backed out, the info display changed to a camera view behind the car. Otherwise it showed me the moving average of my fuel consumption as a set of bar graphs. I could change the display units on the speedometer from Imperial to metric.

I drove into the parking lot of Fry's just south of Portland. Wandering around, I spotted Seagate external USB hard drives of 500G capacity for US$139.99. Two of them went into my shopping cart. Looking at flash drives, I found a flash storage unit in a small box, thinner than a cigarette pack but longer, that had 15G and sold for US$66.98. Two of those fell into my shopping cart.

Friend Larry called with an offer of Italian lunch. It was delicious, topped with gelato. I hit the cash machine and we went back to Fry's. The PDA display consisted of boxed units either double-wrapped with strapping tape or housed in alarm boxes. I saw the Nokia and The Palm TX, but I could only imagine what they must look like. A salesman said they could open them to show them to me at a certain sales counter. It was then I saw the Sony Reader box. A customer said they had one on display.

The reader was strapped into a metal affair that rendered it immobile. I could see the quality of the screen. It was a tad greyer than I had believed, but more readable than any monochrome PDA. I hadn't realized it wa so big! The unit was non-functional.

I went back over to the PDA shelf and checked the price on the readers. They had an opened box for US$332. I took it to the magic sales desk and had it opened and demonstrated. It worked well. The screen latency and ghosting were in the range of unnoticable to unproblematic. I pronounced it "sold" and the salesman wrote it up for me. Between the reader and the storage, it ate up all my cash. Oregon has no sales tax, so I paid with a grin. I would have to hit the ATM again though before driving on.

Back in Seattle, I popped a 4G SD card into my new reader and loaded it with books. Wow! I like it. It is just the right size and weight for easy comfortable reading.

I hope on my flight back I don't sit next to a pretty girl. There are so many books I want to read now.