The Fact is I Just Love Gadgets and Want to be a Gadget Guy

I have always had a love affair with small electronic things.  This is not anything meant to be perverted, just the truth.  Even when I was a kid, the smaller the little gadget, the more fascinated I was.  I remember staring at my dad’s pocket calculator and being fascinated.  That was at a time when a pocket calculator could cost you a few hundred dollars, as well.  I remember staring with equal fascination at his digital watch.

We were one of the first families to have a home entertainment gaming system.  It was a set that allowed up to play games in the same style as Pong.  We had that for a few years, just long enough to burn a nearly permanent image of the dashes and dots into the television screen, and then we had an Atari.  It was a revolution and a revelation.  We were also the first family to own a VCR, and it was Beta and it was enormous and you had to load the thing on the top and, if you were lucky, you got about two hours worth of recording time.  Again, it changed our world.

As I grew older, the love of gadgets did not stop.  I never developed that love of gadgets for large things like cars.  I always liked the smaller things.  I remember falling in love with a small transistor radio that my grandmother had.  I remember searching through a catalog that has a number of small radios, including one that was just an ear piece fit into your ear canal and then you could listen to FM stations.  I got the thing that looked like a pen and picked up AM stations.

I remember discovering my dad’s shortwave radio and then spending hours and hours listening to radio stations from around the world.  I remember with glee discovering the frequency that allowed me to listen in on ham radio operators, some of the original car phones and the police and emergency bands.  

While my other friends were oohing and aahing over cars and other things, I was fascinated by the microcassette recorder my dad got me for Christmas one year.  I was fascinated at the tiny cassette tapes and how they looked like the big cassette tapes in miniature.  I remember getting a Walk-Man and was amazed by the auto-reverse on the one I was given for a birthday present.  

Basically, if it is small and electronic, I want it.  Even if I cannot keep it, I want to play with it and see what it can do.  To say that we live in my era, at least when it comes to electronics, is just a bit of an understatement.  It seems like every day I come across another gadget that I salivate over and wish that I could play with.

The problem is that gadgets cost money.  The best ones cost a lot of money.  Given that I am a writer, I read and hear about other writers and you read and hear about the guys who write about gadgets and how they get sent free version of the latest gadgets and then get to play with them with the condition being that they are supposed to write about them.  I can do that, but I guess I am just not perceived as a gadget guy.

I still love gadgets.  I have many.  I have a mobile phone powered by the Android operating system.  I have a laptop.  I use the cloud computing services to free up the space on said laptop.  I try to stay on the cutting edge.  The problem is the gadget people are always three steps ahead of me.  And my pocketbook just cannot keep up.

I would kill to be given a Motorola Xoom to play with for a few days.  I’d love for Motorola to give me one, but I would be happy to keep one for a couple days and then just write about it.  I would do the same for my current favorite gadget, the Motorola Atrix phone with the laptop docking station.  I mean, come on, a phone that is also a computer?  How James Bond can you get?

I have tried to make things happen.  When I found out that Google was going to release laptops that would be powered by their Chrome OS, I leaped at the chance to get one of their testing laptops.  I even went out and filled out the online form.  Did they give me a chance?  Not in the least.

I don’t know why companies don’t want to give me gadgets to play with.  I would be nice, as long as the gadgets were nice to me.  I’m a gadget guy.  I would love to review them

So, if you are an inventor or someone who makes the decisions about this kind of thing for a company that makes gadgets, give me a call.  Or just mail me something.  I promise to write about it.  I promise to be honest about it.  And if you ask really nice, I might even return the gadget to you when I’m done.  Then again, donations of a more permanent basis are always welcome.