It was bound to happen. I kept walking around in the Taipei Taiwan airport. I have no interested in the endless vendors of high priced booze, toilet water, watches, or jewelry. I am always in search of electronics. Usually I am very disappointed, I've usually already seen everything. But I kept walking, just to at least get some exercise.
Finally I found an electronics store. OK. The usual clocks, the endless bluetooth headsets and hand phones. Found that they have 32GB thumb drives now from Kingston. I just bought a 16GB thumb drive a few days ago for about $50. I've already got enough old thumb drives in my bag to create a necklace that would look like digital shark teeth.
They also had a 64GB solidstate external USB drive from Buffalo. I've been pretty happy with the ruggedness of the external buffalo hard drives, a solidstate drive should be even better. I looked at the box, and the box said the solidstate drive has an even faster read speed, but is slower on writing. Interesting.
Then I took a look at the subnotebooks. They had the usual Acer Aspire One, no good in my opinion because the vertical resolution on the screen is only 600 pixels. You really need 800 pixels for a recent computer. I just upgraded to the latest fujitsu ultra mobile PC which has 1368x800 resolution, and it is a big plus over the resolution of 1024x600 on the previous model. The new fujitsu also has more keys on the keyboard, which is very helpful, although it still has some strangely placed keys. I took the old fujitsu back to Windows XP, since a 900mhz single core processor isn't really enough for the vista it came with. The new fujitsu has an Atom processor at 1.6ghz with two cores, and that runs vista acceptably, at least so far.
As I was looking over the laptops, I noticed a new laptop from Gigabyte. It was playing some incredibly loud music, I thought for sure it must have external speakers. The sales girl came over and told me the price in US$: Just $577 USD. That's a great price! And it has 1358x768 resolution. And Windows XP. And a standard keyboard layout. About one inch or more smaller in each dimension than my old 10" laptop. The gigabyte is too small to have a built in cdrom drive, but that is ok, I always carry an external one for the little Fujitsus. Oh yeah, and the screen is touch sensitive and will flip around into tablet pc position.
That was too much for me to resist. I had to buy it. I had a fun time showing the salespeople my Fujitsu, that had never seen a laptop that small. I also showed them my two year old Sony 17" blue ray monster sized laptop, they were very impressed with how big that one was.
They gave me a 10% discount on accessories, so I picked up one of those 64GB external drives.
Then I had a great big bowl of Japanese vegetarian noodle soup for just $6 at the restaurant near gate C8. Hopefully that will relieve the indigestion I got from some kiwi juice and pastry samples I had. Hopefully the salt wasn't too great so I'll get a hydration effect rather than just water retention.