Back in 1998, on brisingamen's TAFF trip, I fell in love with pnh's Palm Pilot. So much so, that as soon as I got back to the UK I bought one for myself. It was far and away the most useful device I have found for keeping some sort of control of my life. I'm now on, I think, my third Palm. However, it is now coming to the end of its useful life, if that is not an understatement given that it is not charging properly, it is not synching properly to my computer, the touchscreen is starting to go wonky, and so on and so forth.

I've been looking round for a while for a replacement, but Palm have stopped making PDAs, and all of the alternative's I've found seem more problematic than useful.

Then, last weekend, drasecretcampus came for a visit, and started making notes on his iPod Touch. Aha, my eyes lit up. I had a good look at it, then MKS and I started doing some online research, and the end result is that am now the proud possessor of a new 32gig 3rd generation iPod Touch.

Of course, this is primarily an mp3 player, so this means retiring another piece of kit.

Some five or six years ago (we can't quite remember how long it has been), MKS gave me a 1gb mp3 player, which has turned out to be perhaps the happiest Christmas present I've ever received. All of a sudden my commute was an awful lot nicer, since I no longer have to listen to other people's inane mobile phone conversations. The player is still going strong, even though it has been worked to excess, and I am very reluctant to give it up. But the iPod will carry probably my entire music collection, so that's another big switch over.

I'll be getting the new device set up tonight and over the weekend will be deciding which Apps I might need to download (I'm thinking Google for a start), so this is my last day with the Palm (misbehaving as usual) and the mp3 player (behaving impeccably). The end of an era.