Gadget

Friday. "Paper Day".

Feng was today's discussion leader. The paper was good, but the copies of the paper were bad. All the figures were fuzzy, and some were just black blocks with different shades of grey dots. It was like a Jackson Pollock's black-and-white art collection.

It wasn't Feng's fault. When you copy a color picture on a black-and-white xerox machine, the colors are lost, along with the details. We usually work around this problem by print out one color copy on my boss's Epson Ink-jet printer. But it was broken last week, so we were stuck with these bad black-and-white figures.

How were we supposed to critically discuss a paper without the figures now?

But Feng was a guy full of ideas. He took out a shiny gadget from his pocket and put it in the center of the table.

"I have downloaded the figures to this thing. So let's look at figure 1..."

It was an ASUS MYPAL A620 PocketPC.

The figures on its screen were of course colorful and sharp. Everyone was riveted. Even the boss murmured something as he was fiddling with it:"What is this thing? A PocketPC...Emm. I should get one of these..."

I was fascinated by how technology had changed our "presentation landscape". Just a few years ago everyone was satisfied with overhead transparencies in presentations. Laptop+PowerPoint was considered a way too "hip" for many professors. But these days everybody had migrated to the PowerPoint land, and the transparencies are used only as backups, "just in case".

Today the PocketPC took the center stage.

Talk about Evolution!