There are two trends among modern finance professionals. One is the move towards paperless working, the other is mobile working. Laptops, Wi-Fi and mobile phones have opened up new opportunities to be productive away from the office, but who says it can’t be fun too?
As a long-time fan of DAB radio, my next gadget has to be a DAB car radio. Some manufacturers such as Ford offer them as standard on some models now. For the rest of us, the Pure Highway is the next best thing, a portable DAB receiver that transmits Planet Rock and the other great DAB-only radio stations to your car radio using a spare FM frequency. If anyone brings out a mobile phone with build in DAB radio I’ll be first in the queue.
Two other mobile devices I wouldn’t be without are:
Bluetooth hands-free car phone unit. I have a Parrot unit wired into my car, but again I know some car manufacturers supply radios with Bluetooth phone connectivity built-in. I love it, my phone lives in my pocket all day and as soon as I get in the car it connects to the hand-free unit and I’m off. I don’t have to do anything. The Parrot unit holds a copy of my phone book which it automatically synchronises with my phone so I can make a call by just pressing a couple of buttons. It would also do voice dialling if I had the patience to program it!
The other must-have is my sat-nav. In-car I have my trusty TomTom, mainly to remind me to keep to the speed limit, but occasionally to help with route finding too. A brilliant piece of kit. Off the beaten track I have an old Garmin GPS unit that tells me my position using OS map co-ordinates so I don’t get lost hill walking. Already on my Christmas list for 2010 is the new Memory Map Adventurer 2800 due out early next year (so-called because it’s going to cost about £280?) which combines OS maps and GPS, with companion digital maps you can use and print on your PC. Looks great. They just need to sort out the battery life on these things though! For those with less rugged outdoor pursuits, there’s a GPS golf shotsaver application you can plug into the Adventurer to calculate distances on the golf course.
