Are you keeping up with this long forgotten world changers?
In the last post we looked at the Hero Robot!
At Enigin we love our gadgets, as we know many Enigin Distributors also do.
So here is the fifth of technology that didn’t change the world.
by Steve Hill
I mentioned in my last article the usefulness of iPods and iPads when heading out into the hills, with GPS, maps and routes all available as apps or services.
After using some of these features on a reasonable low level walk in the North East of England last month I then headed west to the English mountains in England’s beautiful Lake District and used a borrowed iPad in earnest to help me and wife up a reasonably serious route up Helvellyn peak.
Downloading a map proved helpful, but even better was an app called Viewranger which provided a map of our route, with links to even better maps. It went beyond providing maps with a detailed route guide, which I was able to use as toiled upward and then traversed a narrow rocky ridge, the infamous Striding Edge.
By Steve Hill
I have been enjoying the World Cup at home in HD, it has been crisp, sharp and clear and worth the cost.
But like all these after awhile I hardly noticed, that is until I went to a friends house to watch a match on SD television - suddenly the fuzziness became apparent and I wanted to get back to my HD screen.
By the same token later on I saw several games on my daughters older CRT, traditional tube, telly which was not at all bad - after all it was designed for SD broadcasts. My mates telly was a top brand LCD and was just awful, but my daughters 10 year old telly was great.
As a self-respecting technology-addict, I have to talk about the new Apple tablet. My colleagues at Enigin, also being into high tech breakthroughs, found the new apple baby to be pure genius!
It’s basically a large iPhone and you can do anything on it! Watch a movie if you want! Touch-screen obliges, everything is easy to access and we’re now officially entering the era of new technological equipment which not so long ago seemed fictitious and impossible to achieve in the latest Hollywood blockbusters.. Tom Cruise starred in one of those movies, Minority Report, and the technology seemed unreal, right? Well here we are, we’re definitely getting close to fiction with this little gem!
So I joined the “webphone” revolution.
I was sorely tempted to wait until I could get an iPhone on someone other than O2, but the grapevine was showing clear signs that no-one else would offer the “unlimited Internet” deal as O2 have done throughout their iPhone reign in the UK. I was sorely tempted by the Android mobiles, but I couldn’t find any at a price-point that I could justify that had slide-out keyboards – a pet annoyance of mine as I find it really hard to type on visual-only keyboards with no tactile feedback. Anyho, I hadn’t really given the Palm Prē any thought but after using it for a few minutes, I was quite happy with it. Now, I new the Prē was a Linux device, but I was even happier when I discovered that it was so easy to “get into” - no cracking needed, no firmware updating required, just download and install the Palm SDK and away you go!
My shiny new Palm Prē now runs a number of non-Palm applications and modifications– my next challenge is to get it a public IP address and have my Prē show all sorts of “interesting” (to me) stats, etc, on a mini webpage. 
The Enigin PLC number one Geek... though I’m also their only geek so that doesn’t say much...