Obsolescence-o-phobia !!

I have read somewhere that English gains about six and loses about four words a year. So if anybody is into the art/profession of coining new words, please create one for the "fear of the light speed obsolescence of gizmos". I suffer from it. For well over a year I have been vacillating about buying a camcorder and everytime I hear someone say that their gadget now costs half of what they had originally spent on it and that better and far more capable devices are available now, my heart sinks.

Anyway, a couple of gadgets have finally made their way into my life recently. After being blown away by the GPS I had on a car that I rented to travel to Washington DC, I decided to buy one. I am sure I would have lost my way and wandered around in the night if I had relied on my printouts from Mapquest alone. So I finally bought the "Garmin Street Pilot i3". To put it simply -"Its a great invention". StreetPilot i3 offers me everything I need for my peregrinations - A robust navigation system with good signal strength, Automatic routing, Voice guidance with turn-by-turn directions , address lookup and 2D/ 3D maps. It has 32K-colour display and mounts perfectly on my wind shield. This particular model has been discontinued but I got a a very good deal and hence went for it, inspite of gravitating towards the c330 model.

The next one to walk the ramp and catch my attention was the ubiquitous Ipod. I had no plans of buying one till I saw an offer on Amazon where the 4GB nano was being offered for $149 (the original market price being $199). I have loaded a couple of audio books and some music that I got from the Schenectady Public Library yesterday.

The third one is a real life saver. With my laptop having crashed twice already in the last one year, I needed to take periodic backups of my data. I hated storing them on multiple DVDs and therefore went for a portable hard drive. Now, this baby is unbelievebly small for its capacity. It fits into the palm of my hand, weights roughly 100 grams but stores a whopping 120 GB. I am certain that the days of Tera and Peta byte storage are not far away. The Blue Ray disk has not yet reached many hands and it has already been overtaken by holographic storage.

Wonder how many more new technologies would become obsolete even before they hit the market !