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Reviews: Perfect PowerBook Stocking Stuffers

by Paul Cesarini

Having a hard time deciding what to buy for your Palm or PowerBook using friend? Look no further. The following products share three common traits: small (either in form factor or ram / disk space requirements), inexpensive, and cool. While none can be described as essential, each shines in certain situations.

Boostaroo
	SRP / SP:	$19.95 / NA (new)
	Requirements:	Batteries; Any desktop or notebook computer with headphone jack
	What's Hot:	Tiny; Works as advertised; connects up to three headphones
	What's Not:	No power indicator light

Quite a lot has been written about boosting headphone output on laptops lately. In the quiet, privacy of your home or the local library the audio-output of your laptop may seem fine for CDs or DVDs. Try listening to those same CDs and DVDs while on a 737, and it's a different story. At best, you can kind of listen to music, and sort of enjoy a DVD. For the most part, it's an exercise in futility. There are numerous noise-dampening headphones available to alleviate this problem. They tend to work quite well. Unfortunately, most are in the $150 - $250 price range. So if you can't cancel out the background noise, what are your options? Boost the output to your plain vanilla headphones, of course. This is where Boostaroo comes in.

Boostaroo is a portable audio amplifier that can, according to the product literature, boost the volume by 40%. After giving it a try during that same flight to Baltimore, that 40% figure sounds about right. I could still hear the plane, of course, but I could also hear Tom Hanks while watching The Green Mile on my PowerBook.

The Boostaroo folks also claim their product extends the battery life of whatever device it's connected to, since their product uses its own power supply (batteries, not provided). This seems to make sense, I think. I'm certainly not an expert on power drain in portable electronic devices. Their reasoning is as follows:

"When you have a battery loss, the power is not taken away from the mechanisms that run the unit; the power is subtracted from headphones. When you lose the full power to your headphones, you have to crank up the volume to make up for that loss... However, turning up the volume on your player also drains the batteries faster. It's a vicious cycle. The Boostaroo lets you leave the volume low on your player, and it also gives you the added gain you need."

A particularly nice feature of Boostaroo is that it allows simultaneous connection of up to three headphones. So if you and a friend want to watch O Brother, Where Art Thou on your laptop while flying to a conference, you can now do that. The same goes for keeping the kids entertained during a long flight. In a crowded plane, Dr. Seuss + Boostaroo + laptop = peace for parents.

One minor complaint is that Boostaroo has no power indicator light. It's somewhat easy to inadvertently turn the device on, particularly if it's rubbing against the usual assortment of cables and adapters found in a laptop bag. It would be nice to see, at a glance, if it's been turned on by mistake. Still, for $20 you can't go wrong. Boostaroo is a welcome addition to any laptop.

Atek Super Mini Optical Mouse
	SRP / SP:	$49.95 / $39.99
	Requirements:	Any desktop or notebook computer with a USB port
	What's Hot:	Tiny; programmable Mac drivers available
	What's Not:	Tiny; no scroll wheel

How small is too small? That's the question that kept coming up while using the Atek Super mini Optical Mouse. It's easily the smallest mouse I've ever seen (optical or otherwise), sporting a form factor roughly half the size of the of Macally iOpti Jr. and similarly competing products. It's a mere 2.5" long and 1" wide -- about the same size of a thick domino, if you can believe it.

While this mouse is just plain painful for extended, daily use, it does come in handy in space constrained situations. It's well-suited for airplane trays, and school chair / desks, and is close to ideal for laptop assisted presentations at podiums or similar events. I used it repeatedly on a recent flight to Baltimore, and it worked quite well.

No Mac drivers are included in the box, which means Mac users can't initially program the mouse buttons. However, Mac-specific drivers are available via the Atek web site; these drivers work quite well. Atek also points out that the mouse is compatible with USB Overdrive, should you already own a copy.

If I could think of one addition for this microscopic mouse, it would be an equally microscopic scroll wheel. Let's face it, a mouse without a scroll wheel is like a car without air conditioning: we've come to think of it as standard equipment.

The Super Mini Optical Mouse isn't for everyone. However, if you're on the road quite a bit and demand the lightest possible load in your laptop case, this is the mouse to have.

Blue Nomad WordSmith
	SRP / SP:	$39.95 / $26.95
	Requirements:	Palm OS-based PDA and a computer
	What's Hot:	Great word processor; ideal for eBooks; solid Mac support
	What's Not:	No full office suite available

For those times when you'd rather not take a laptop with you, but still plan on using a PDA to take notes and access documents, consider WordSmith. Blue Nomad, creators of Backup Buddy and other handy Palm apps, have created a robust, full-featured word processor in WordSmith, and have married it with an equally robust memo pad replacement component. Wordsmith can also be used as a defacto eBook reader for any DOC or RTF files, or PDF files that have been converted to RTF (using Acrobat 5).

WordSmith provides quick and easy access to documents transferred from your computer. It transfers new documents created on your Palm back to your computer with equal ease. WordSmith allows stylized text, paragraph formatting, bulleted lists, superscript / subscript, and a raft of other features common in most desktop or laptop word processors. WordSmith is ideally suited for Stowaway keyboards and unlike the Windows-only QuickOffice, offers full Mac support.

Having used WordSmith for a few months now to take notes, write memos, compose articles, and read eBooks, I admit Blue Nomad has left little room for complaints. WordSmith works, and it works well. Plus, there's simply a ton of free eBooks out there -- including everything from the Tao Te Ching to the script from Army of Darkness -- and the average 8mb Palm can store several at once.

I'm of the opinion WordSmith should be preinstalled on all new Palm OS-based PDAs. My only gripe is that Blue Nomad doesn't have a "WordSmith Office" suite available. I'd love to access presentations, graphs, charts, and spreadsheets from my trusty Palm Vx.