Hit the Beach With Technology

Summer means vacation, but vacation means different things to different people. To some, it offers the chance to get away from it all and indulge in the bad habits that will spur next year’s resolutions. To others, it brings the challenge of staying connected with the folks, and the projects, back at the office. Either way, technology can help. Whether you want to give it 110 percent on vacation or simply maintain life support at 3 percent, the following gadgets will come in handy.

PANASONIC TOUGHBOOK CF-W7

For years, Panasonic has been one of the few computer manufacturers to truly understand what an ultralight PC should be — and how to design it. Each new featherweight Toughbook has been an engineering marvel, and the new CF-W7 is no exception. It’s got everything Apple’s new MacBook Air is missing: a built-in optical drive, a removable battery, multiple USB ports (three, to the Air’s paltry one). And the Toughbook does it all while weighing in at the same three pounds. Yet it’s the Air that’s getting all the buzz.

Why? Blame it on style. This isn’t the Air’s ugly sister. It’s the sister kept locked in the basement. The Toughbook is almost stunningly bulky, measuring a full-figured 2 inches at its thickest point (the Air, on the other hand, fits in a manila envelope). It has no wide-screen display; just an old-school — if vibrant — 12.1-inch screen. No slick keyboard or curves.

But beyond the homely exterior, the Toughbook is a winner. For years Panasonic has been the only laptop maker to squeeze an optical drive into a 3-pound laptop. Apple says that’s old-school, too; something no longer necessary in the era of Wi-Fi and downloadable content. But flying at 38,000 feet — the exact sort of place you’ll want to take an ultralight laptop — you just might want to pop in a DVD.

Mobile users also want long battery life, and Panasonic delivers here as well. With Wi-Fi turned on and screen brightness on full, we got five hours of power. Also impressive was the three hours of DVD play — a notoriously battery-draining activity — the Toughbook eked out. And the Toughbook has built-in technology to let users access the Internet via high-speed wireless networks from Sprint, AT&T and Verizon.

Our biggest gripe with the Toughbook? This is an expensive machine. Its $2,349 estimated street price (for 1 gigabyte of RAM) is more than $500 over the MacBook Air’s sticker price, which itself is up there. Still, even with its bloated cost and chunky profile, the Toughbook is the smartest-designed 3-pound laptop on the market today.

SLINGBOX SOLO

With its angular design and glossy black finish, the $180 Slingbox Solo looks like Darth Vader’s cable box. One can make the case, however, that this gadget is cooler than anything found in a “Star Wars” movie. What it does is realize one of mankind’s greatest hopes: the ability to take our TV everywhere.

Here’s how it works: The Slingbox connects to both your video source (digital cable box, DVR, satellite receiver, or DVD player) and your home network. You then install free software on your computer. Once the pieces are in place, you can control and view your television remotely from any PC or Mac on your network, or any location where there is a broadband Internet connection.

The picture was extremely sharp (if not quite DVD quality) when we were viewing the feed from another room in the house. Going off-site, things get a bit stickier. Picture quality degraded noticeably when we accessed our Slingbox via a Wi-Fi hotspot with a less-than-perfect signal.

A couple of caveats: Since the Slingbox needs to be physically plugged into both your video source and your network, you’ll fare best if your router is near your TV. Second, to view your videos remotely (from beyond your home network), the Slingbox needs to change some router settings. Make sure you remember the password you used way back when you set the router up. I didn’t, and needed to dust off an old manual to figure it out.

LG VOYAGER

On first glance, LG Electronics’s new Voyager phone — available exclusively through Verizon Wireless — has “tries too hard” written all over it. It has everything: GPS navigation, music player, dual color screens, QWERTY keyboard, Web browser, 2-megapixel camera, and “VibeTouch” technology for tactile — if initially kind of creepy — feedback while you tap out phone numbers. Most of these features are perfectly adequate — but nothing spectacular.

Yet the Voyager ($300 with a two-year contract) has one genuinely cool twist: It doubles as a mobile television. It doesn’t play video files you’ve loaded into memory, it plays live network television; full-length programs from eight channels optimized for mobile viewing (including CBS Mobile, Fox, NBC, ESPN and Comedy Central). Afternoon soaps, old “Star Trek” episodes, “CSI,” “The Daily Show,” the “CBS Evening News” — all of these, and much more, can be viewed live via Verizon’s new V Cast Mobile TV service. Picture quality won’t match the HDTVs of 2008 — or the rabbit-ear models of 1978. But is there a better way to pass time on the airport security line? Verizon charges $25 a month for all-you-can-eat television viewing (the fee includes unlimited Web access and e-mail as well). Of course, our one beef is that losing our phone now truly means losing our social life.

Verizon USB727 EV-DO MODEM

We’ve long been big fans of another Verizon Wireless offering, its Broadband Access service. It offers relatively high-speed Internet access (not quite what you’d get at home or in the office, but pretty close) through the company’s EV-DO network (available in most major U.S. cities), eliminating the need to find a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Verizon’s new USB727 modem puts all the necessary hardware for connecting with Broadband Access on a device about the size of a cigarette lighter. Plug it into a Windows, Mac or Linux-based laptop and you’re good to go.

The modem has a slot for a micro-SD memory card (of up to 4 gigabytes), so you can take your files along with your Internet access.

Like any cell signal, BroadbandAccess will bump you off the network here and there, but each time this happened, we were able to reconnect quickly. The one thing we weren’t crazy about was Verizon’s pricing model. The modem itself isn’t outrageously priced, coming in at $150 when you commit to two years’ service. But Verizon caps the amount of data that can be transmitted each month. For $60, users get 50 gigabytes of data to work with (enough, Verizon says, for looking at 35,000 Web pages); for $40, the limit is a far punier 50 megabytes. Once you go over those limits, you’ll pay big premiums: 49 or 99 cents for each extra megabyte, depending on your plan. We’ve got enough problems keeping tabs on our cell phone minutes. When Verizon opts for an all-you-can-surf pricing model, BroadbandAccess — and this nifty little modem — will be a far more attractive option.

NIKE+ iPOD

This $30 add-on turns any iPod Nano into a personal training device, keeping runners (and walkers) abreast of distance, pace, time elapsed and calories burned during their workouts. The system has two parts: a sensor that is worn in your sneaker (which tracks the distance you cover); and a tiny receiver that plugs into the iPod and picks up data sent by the sensor. It’s all wireless and effortless, with no software to install and a simple interface that can be mastered without ever peeking at the manual.