"I'd definitely recommend a car charger, sir. You'll need the officially licensed one, however, as your new music player requires a 17.847815872359 volt input."
"The bundled headphones aren't very good, sir, no. This authorized alternative has the same four pronged abnormal interface module, though. Yes, sir, they do cost as much as my mother makes turning tricks."
So, for a couple of years, I found my personal area network gradually disintegrating. My pockets carried "paper" books; I was forced to interact with people instead of using headphones to ignore them; if I wanted to check my horoscope, I had to buy a paper. It was like being in the frigging dark ages.
Quite without any action on my part, I was made to suffer a Pocket PC for work and my yearly mobile phone upgrades forced a new level of power hungry equipment back into my tough-guy jacket pockets. Not that it wasn't welcome, in many respects, as my absence from such devices meant a new world of connectivity and computing capabilities to rediscover.
It's thrilling to find you can now scan someone's business card instead of entering their contact details manually (that function must have added minutes to my life - I think I'll use them to watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force on my mobile phone, on my death bed), that I could photograph people who fell in the street for all of YouTube to see, that my Bluetooth headphones not only paused the music while I took a call, but did away with the wayward wire I used to battle with so furiously.
Naturally those urges to electronically equip myself came flooding back, but the huge leaps and bounds that technology had gaily taken did the harmony twixt machine and battery asunder. A day of moderately abusive use now leaves me with terminally flat batteries, and a new addition to the M65 mobile office jacket is required: battery chargers.
Since my Rambo-esque coat once again became a hub of personal interconnectivity, I've become something of an unwitting expert when it comes to keeping my pockets full of electronic life. Being as I'm of the obstroculous mindset that thriftily minimizes the need for excessive, after-sales accessory shopping, I always put some forethought into the power connection of the gear in question. (One of the reasons I don't own any Sony [bony] - not that it's bad tackle, quite the opposite, but I'll put a blunt bullet through my knee before I willingly make accessory salesmen rich, God damn it.)
Third-party manufacturers, I find, make a much more concerted effort when it comes to helping out the power-hungry, mobile technophile and, against all efforts from first parties to stop them, regularly attempt to provide the Holy Grail of portable power; the universal charger.
They laughed at Trevor Baylis when he invented the clockwork radio, but a pocket sized, wind-up charger is now an affordable emergency power source, although panting into a mobile phone while vigorously pumping away at a hand-held dynamo, desperate to retain a waning signal does have an adverse effect on your social status.
A multitude of external battery packs have also become available, although your personal area network jacket will need an extra pocket for all the adaptors and cables, which, inevitably, will only be suitable for 75 percent of your technological baggage.
The future makes vague, noncommittal promises about a next generation of portable power supplies, but none seem to be the revolution my gear is waiting for. Fuel cells are a pretty significant talking point for laptop and mobile phone manufacturers, though the evidence of their practicality has yet to be presented. From a consumer's perspective, it's hard to care exactly what kind of electro-chemical reaction is powering my DS Lite, so long as it lasts for ages and is easily replenished, and it's this latter aspect that raises my suspicious eyebrow at fuel cells.
