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I never thought I’d say it, but perfection is getting pretty close. I got a whole slew of gadgets over the last week even as I suffered though a week in NYC. I’ve never had such a list of highly recommended products before. This is for Jeff Merriman-Cohen and Jon who asked mre for the perfect products:

• VAIO T140 Notebook (Sony-VGNT140PL). Well, I have to say this is just about the perfect laptop. Weighs just 3.1 pounds, has a 1.1GHz Pentium M processor so is decently fast. Most importantly, it has a beautiful screen (10.4” wide screen), and a special mode for DVD showing plus a battery life of 5 hours at least. The only drawback I’ve found is that this model has a 40GB drive and 5GB is hidden from users by Sony. They have a strange recovery scheme where they hive off a bunch of hard disk that you can’t use. Yuck. I’ll have to reformat to get those precision bytes back. Right now it is just $1800 at techonweb.com
• iPod Photo. This thing is absolutely a ripoff at $500. But it is beautiful. The screen is tiny but very nice. And the user interface is great. I have to say the synchronization for music is great, but it is a bit wierd to use iTunes to synchronize your photos and the UI is really buried. Still, a beautiful product.
• Etymotic. They are expensive, but I’m telling you, hold your noise and pay $99 for the ER-6 or $200 for the ER-4. I listened to them for 6 hours on the plane and 1 hour in the gym. It is the single most important thing you can do for listening. Its the speakers dummy.

• Nokia 6620. These are just $99 and on AT&T Wireless, you get EDGE. In Seattle, that means a real 100KBps. While you are at it, get a 1GB Kingmax MMC001G3S card. Then with the right encoding, you can put 700 tracks on your cell phone and with the HDS-3 headset, you get an iPod experience for just $24/month for unlimited data. Its a steal and the kids just love it. It will of course all get better when you don’t sideload your music but get it over the air.