Technology is the servant

NEW YORK — I have this recurring, peculiar-to-a-journalist nightmare. I’m out for a jog carrying nothing beyond my running outfit, and I happen upon news.

A plane crashes. Terrorists attack. You name it.

I’ve got nothing to write with or on, no tape recorder for interviews.

But technology can be my servant. What I require is a digital music player small and light enough to strap to my upper arm. It should double as a voice recorder. And let it include an FM radio.

The iRiver iFP-395T player does all that for $299 — with 512 megabytes of flash memory, a nice set of Sennheiser earphones and a comfortable elastic sport band for upper-arm wear.

It weighs only two ounces with the AA battery, which provides about 20 hours of play time, and is shaped like a pudgy 3.5-inch canoe. WMA and ASF audio formats are supported in addition to MP3; there’s room for about six hours of music at standard recording rates or 144 hours of voice recorded at 8 kilobits per second.

The unit even ships with a line-in cable that enables analog audio recording from an external device. A USB cable is included for PC-to-player data transfer.

But all is not rosy:

Navigation is anything but intuitive;

I found the FM tuner relatively weak on my suburban New York running routes.

The Windows file manager software was relatively primitive, with no support for playlists — unless you create separate folders for them;

Although you can preset FM stations and record off them, there is no timer for scheduling recordings.

I’m one who can’t help but cringe when I see people hold telephone receivers to their ears for any length of time.

My neck aches for them.

I’m a headset guy and Plantronics, whose products I’ve been buying for years, has finally truly liberated me with the CS50 — a totally wireless affair.

Unlike headsets tethered by wire to a compact receiver that you hook onto your belt, this is a craftily engineered, lightweight, self-contained joy.

The quality is crisp, with a range up to 300 feet and a noise-canceling microphone. I’m hooked — though at $230 you’re not apt to be enticed unless you spend considerable time on the phone.

Connect the CS50’s base station and charger to your phone terminal and answer calls with the simple press of a button on the headset. Mute the calls with another button. Your conversations also are digitally encrypted so others on the 900 megahertz frequency the headset uses can’t listen in.

The only thing the CS50 can’t do is actually dial a call.

It sounds like a motto for our younger, always-on (and dare I say impetuous) generation: "Get It Now."

That moniker belongs to a menu of data services Verizon Wireless offers that include Xpherix Corp.’s Remo, a very clever invention indeed.

Back in August we reviewed another Xpherix product, iPhonebook. The concept is simple. You’re far from a computer but you have your cell phone. You need a phone number, address or e-mail, but it’s on your desktop computer. How to get it?

With surprising ease, it turns out. You download the application to your cell phone and, separately, install software to the PC containing the contacts you want (Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express and Palm Desktop are supported). Then you synchronize with Internet-based servers.

Remo adds e-mail and calendar use. For the latter, Outlook is required on the computer involved. And if you’ve got multiple e-mail accounts Remo supports up to seven.

So if your PC’s personal info manager is up-to-date, your phone can be, too. It takes a few seconds to download each gulp of data, but if you’re in a pinch, this is a charm. And addresses can be downloaded not just temporarily but into the cell phone’s permanent address book.

Is the service worth the $8 per month that Verizon Wireless charges? For me — and I remain unconvinced by smartphones (which combine PDAs with cell phones but are hobbled by still-insufficient battery life) — it’s something I’d seriously consider if I were on the road a lot and couldn’t afford or didn’t do enough remote e-mail to want a Blackberry or similar device.