Columns

I'm writing this column from Italy where spring is in full spate, albeit rather wetter than usual. This is fine with the locals who last year had a serious drought - and it's okay by me because it has restored my well water to pristine clarity (I could sell it as posh mineral water if I had some fancy blue bottles).

Spring has brought with it the usual scattering of IT-related challenges, including the annoyance of wildly fluctuating bandwidth on my Internet connection, but the biggest problem was that my trusty HP810 portable CD burner expired. This is an issue, as I rely entirely on it for data backup when away from London. I went into Citta di Castello to the Euronics computer store to check out the price of USB flash drives, but as I gazed into the display cabinet it dawned on me that I already have a USB storage device in the shape of my Sony CLIÉ's Memory Stick.

I told the story here last month of how I failed to purchase a new laptop due to an attack of Acute Consumer Phobic Disorder, but what I failed to mention in that column is that I awarded myself a consolation prize by picking up a new CLIÉ TJ27 to replace my trusty monochrome TJ10. That purchase was a little marketing lesson in itself. Despite all my reservations about battery life on colour PDAs with rechargeable batteries, I'd already decided I could no longer avoid colour, partly for readability and partly to write my PDA Poker program for a colour display.

My first preference would have been a Palm Tungsten E, but the very day I went down to Tottenham Court Road I'd read PC Pro's review of the new CLIÉ. The reviewer had given it an 'above-average-but-not-outstanding'

ADVERTISEMENT

verdict, so I went in to handle one. I liked the screen quality and the price, was unmoved by the built-in digital camera, but what swung me was that I already owned a 128MB Memory Stick - hence I could save myself 40-odd quid (for a new SD card if I bought a Tungsten) and a lot of hassle when porting my working environment from the old TJ10. The proliferation of proprietary storage formats is no accident - they tie you into your brand, and it worked on me by causing me to buy my second-preference machine.

However, once I'd got it home I fell in love with the TJ27. I was surprised to find myself using its built-in camera all the time - I take my PDA with me everywhere, unlike my 'grown-up' camera. The camera only has a 640 x 480 resolution, but either the hardware or the interpolation firmware causes its images to degrade in a non-blocky, dithery sort of way that lends them a most attractive impressionist or pointillist quality. I now understand why there exist arty photographic cults - particularly in New York - of certain cheap Russian cameras that generate similar romantic fuzz. What's more, Sony has given it an excellent user interface: sliding a single switch opens the lens cover, switches on the PDA and puts it into the camera app so you just have to tap the screen to shoot. It fulfils exactly the same note-taking role people used to use Polaroids for, and I've even on occasion used it to snap a page of text from a book.

So there I stood in Euronics, realising that not only was the CLIÉ now my visual diary, but also my vital data bank too. My 128MB stick is less than half full, so I can take more than 60MB of current work - writing, source code and the like - with me whenever I leave the house. Sony supplies an excellent utility called Data Import that makes the Memory Stick appear in My Computer as a normal Windows drive, so I can drag and drop the files and folders I need. It won't replace CD-R (or a DVD writer when I do plump for a new laptop) for full backups, but it gives that crucial psychological assurance that all the effort you've just put in is safe from hard disk failure or burglary. It's also made me wonder whether a 1GB CompactFlash card might be a good first-level backup solution in my next laptop.