Dave’s Ipaq – PORTABILITY – The Name Of The Game! @ Dave’s iPAQ

With all that we do in this era of electronics, we have come to discover that portability of our electronic devices is most important. At least that is the case for me and with a new era of my life that I have just begun, I have found that it is extremely important for me to be able to pick up and go when I want but when I go, I want all my “stuff” with me.

I love my iPAQs and use them daily. More often than not, I take my 4700, my Think Outside Keyboard and Mouse and I am off. Usually I can do what I need to do with just those three items but when I really go away, I need more. Yeah, like most of you, being away from my computer for any length of time is hard to do. I have always had a laptop and I used to take it everywhere. I was so happy when I got my first iPAQ because I didn’t need load myself down with all my equipment. I was able to do most things that I needed to do so I was happy.

Now I am finding myself doing an immense amount of traveling and being without my “stuff” for any length of time is hard to do. I am constantly finding things that I need to enter into my files and frankly, my iPAQ doesn’t always fit the bill. I need a laptop and I need the extras that we use daily or weekly or even monthly. For me, the basic survival kit for the road is a laptop, a wireless mouse, an external drive, a scanner and on occasion, a portable printer as well as a couple of my iPAQs and camera.

Of course size is everything when you’re traveling and when I think of what I used to carry and its sheer bulk I am amazed that I ever went anywhere. Fortunately for us, vendors are making our electronics smaller and smaller and better and better so travel has become a bit easier. Years ago I bought my first scanner. It was BIG and BULKY but it did a great job. Of course you could never take it anywhere because it was too heavy and would occupy too much space. I really liked it and used it all the time to copy pictures and to do a little OCR work. About five years ago I bought a second scanner…it was time because my old reliable was starting to find its way to “scanner heaven”. This new scanner was only an inch thick and could scan a full page document. Great quality, excellent software and it was portable (so to speak). It was very thin and light weight and of course I could slip it into one side of my brief case easily.

But the days of the brief case are gone for me so I needed an even better solution for portability. I needed a scanner that was even smaller but one that had the same or better quality than I was used to. Finding the right scanner was going to be a difficult task, or so I thought. Some months back, I stumbled upon a news item about a product that Plustek was introducing. It was their Take-Anywhere Mobile Scanner. I like the item so much and the initial specs that I posted a news item that did very well with our readers. So much so that I decided to take another look at it just to see if it would “fit the bill” for my travel needs. Well folks, it did! This scanner is just incredible! It is extremely portable, very light weight and is a terrific work horse! So how is the quality you say? For OCR work, it is better than I have ever had before and for pictures, it provides me with the ability to make great copies of photos while on the road.