If you ever visit Seattle, make sure you visit the SciFi Museum and their airplane/space museum close to Boeing’s factory. So, here are a few interesting tidbits from our vacation in Seattle:

- A lot of people with iPhones in the Seattle airport. iPhone here, iPhone there. But wait! Here’s a person with just a RaZR. Oh, what is he doing? Ah, he’s taking his iPod out of his pocket!

- Virgin America, the airliner we flew with, runs a touchscreen, flash-based system in their per-seat screens. It’s based on a Red Hat Linux 2004 release, it has 256 MB RAM, and it uses a flash-based filesystem. They also use Google Maps for their geo-tracking. Looked impressive and worked well. They even offered video podcasts of Diggnation for viewing. Only thing missing was internet access.

- While in the museum of music in Seattle, we used an interactive key-learning system that tried to teach you how to play a “hook”. I sucked at it, and started playing random keys, and voila! A blue screen of death! It apparently ran Windows.

The same museum ran an automated version of the open source audio editor Audacity too (in the same hall as the interactive demo one).

Geeks.com, known for their cheap digital cameras, sent us four gadgets for a review: the Kodak M883 8 megapixel digicam, a flash reader, a 16 GB SDHC card, and an iPhone case. It also happened that this weekend we spent it in the beautiful Seattle, visiting museums and friends. What a better way to test these items but by taking them with me to see how they perform and survive the trip!

* Kodak EasyShare M883 8MP 3x Optical/5x Digital Zoom HD Camera
The M883 is a low cost/range 8 MP digicam from Kodak, currently selling below $100. It has a flash, 3x optical zoom, digital image stabilization, video recording capability at VGA resolution and 30fps, a microphone, and a nice, spacious 3″ screen. The camera is physically pretty thin, and stylish.Exactly because the camera is a cheaper one, it has fewer buttons than the $200/$250 range Kodak digicams, but this actually works to its advantage. Switching between video, auto and scene mode is very organic, and the joystick carries through actions like “flash on/off”, focusing, and screen information. Through the main menu you can choose between focusing options, a choice of 4 white balance presets, SDHC formatting, image and video resolution. The main problems with the product is extreme purple fringing, a very mushy look at the upper right side of the image, and complete inability to do macro in any way that’s useful. Adding to that, it takes up to 4-5 seconds to save a JPEG image, which is a rather slow performance. Nevertheless, the “you get what you pay for” doctrine applies here, and the M883 is better than most cameras in that price class. But don’t expect miracles.

* All-in-One USB 2.0 Card Reader/Writer
This travel-size flash reader is an extremely useful tool, for the right price. It’s extremely small and it easily fit in my laptop bag, along its small USB cable. It not only supports all the major flash format card standards, but it is amazing that it can fit in there a Compact Flash reader and full SDHC support. In fact, finding specifically SDHC readers is still an exercise in patience, so this reader has it all: features, and small size.

* Transcend 16GB Class 6 SDHC Memory Card
With the above camera and reader I used a Class-6 16 GB SDHC card; it worked out of the box and without compatibility problems. When I used it with the above reader and the Acer Aspire One netbook that I also had with me, it flew. Reading/writing from and to it was really fast and without problems. A good card to trust for your AVCHD needs as well.

* Leather Case for iPhone
From the four review items in this blog post, this is the worst one. It doesn’t properly fit the iPhone. Sure, it looks good on paper, with a nice build quality, a magnetic lock, all the right cuts around the speaker, microphone, volume keys and camera, but when you actually use it with the iPhone, it proves that can’t be trusted. When opening the magnetic lock to access the phone, the iPhone doesn’t securely sit in the case, and I had two cases where the iPhone almost flew out of place to the floor. I had to use an additional silicone iPhone case to make sit properly in this case.