Aug. 25, 2003
College students are the keepers of some of the niftiest gadgets around.
Poke around any college campus for a bit and you’ll see people toting MP3 players, personal digital assistants and fancy flipping cell phones. Even the CD player is out of style.
While college is the realm of the people known as the “early adaptors” — those gotta-have-it-now-no-matter-what-the-cost people — a high school student can still get plenty of use out of the latest gadgetry.
In high school, I spent $200 on a Sharp Wizard. I could plan my day down to the minute, alphabetize my phone list, and take my notes on it. It was slow, it had a screen that would make the first Gameboy look futuristic, and it could maybe hold about 100 names, but I loved that thing. I was definitely smitten by the novelty of doing everything electronically. Never mind that it was too big to fit into my pocket.
I eventually ditched the note taking and day planning. People always gave me looks when I’d pull it out in class to write stuff down. They just didn’t understand why pen and paper wasn’t good enough. I was left with a glorified — and rather expensive — address book, which after a few years crashed and lost all my information.
Flash forward to today and everyone’s got one of those Palm Pilots. The keyboard of my Wizard has been replaced with a more elegant stylus, but the premise remains the same – you can plan your day, take notes and alphabetize your phone list.
On top of all that, some of the more elaborate (read: expensive) ones can take pictures and play back MP3s. No one looks at you funny when you pull one out anymore, either. In fact, many people mock those still in the pen-and-paper world.
I say bring an electronic organizer and ditch the notebooks; and if you’re the only one, don’t think of yourself as the geek with the organizer. Picture yourself as the one looking toward the future or, if that’s not enough, the one playing Sonic the Hedgehog in the back of the class while everyone else is bored out of their minds. I think that if I tried to load Sonic on my old Wizard, the cheap plastic casing would melt in my hands from working too hard.
Now that we have organized life down to a little electronic widget, I want to know what happened to all the other space toys. If movies, books, and other media that attempt to predict the future are correct, we should have flying cars and voice-activated levitating Twinkies or something by now.
I’ll be the first to jump on the bandwagon when an organizer comes out that can do my laundry, make my dinner and alphabetize my phone list, but right now, I guess I’ll settle for Sonic and a camera. Bonus points if it’s shaped like a levitating Twinkie.
Ahmad is a staff writer for the Press & Sun-Bulletin.
© 2003 Press & Sun-Bulletin, Binghamton, N.Y.