While Panasonic makes military-specification computers used in some of the world’s most inhospitable locales, its F8 and F9 Toughbooks are designed more for the road warrior than the real kind. The F8 and F9 belong to a class of machines called business rugged, meaning in vacation terms that they may survive having a cup of coffee dumped on them. The magnesium-alloy case, with built-in handle, encloses a 14.1-inch anti-glare screen, and the whole package weighs only little more than 3.5 pounds. The F9, which goes on sale in July, starts at $2,899 and includes Windows 7, an Intel Core i5 processor and a 320 gigabyte hard drive; the older F8, with a less powerful Core 2 processor and 250-gigabyte hard drive, lists for $2,499. Since no one buys a computer simply for a few hours of sun and surf, consider the landlocked benefits, too. A shock-mounted hard drive means the F8 and F9 can survive being dropped a foot onto a hard surface, and an optional Gobi chip provides mobile broadband wherever in the world you happen to be.
One of the joys of the beach is beach reading, and the era of the e-reader means no more lugging that extra bag of books — to say nothing of providing cover for readers to indulge in their guilty pleasures. Apple’s iPad is the all-around best, but its glaring weakness is, well, glare. The backlit display and reflective screen make it hard to use in sunlight, even if you weren’t concerned about getting sand in the virtual gears of your $829 3G-enabled baby.
By contrast, Amazon.com’s Kindle thrives outside. Its grayscale digital-ink display is easily readable even in direct sunlight, it weighs a mere 10 ounces and it goes for days on a single charge. An added bonus: Amazon’s family of free Kindle apps syncs your reading material across devices, so you can pick up on your iPad precisely where you left off on the Kindle. Best of all, a price war in the dedicated e-reader market has driven the Kindle’s price down to $189. Think of it as the cheap, convenient paperback next to the iPad’s elegant hardcover.
In case not all your Kodak moments occur on dry land, Eastman Kodak recently added the $149.95 PlaySport to its line of handheld digital video recorders. The PlaySport is physically small — less than an inch thick, 4.5 ounces, with a 2-inch screen — but it shoots big: Full high-definition video at 30 frames per second. You can use it under water up to 10 feet deep, and if you find the controls a little hard to use while you’re in the waves, the built-in image stabilization may help smooth things out.
The PlaySport is also capable of taking still photos, with a sensor rated at 5 megapixels. But if you need more power, Panasonic’s $399.99 Lumix DMC-TS2 puts some of the Toughbook’s DNA into a compact, 14.1-megapixel point-and-shoot camera that’s waterproof at depths up to 33 feet and includes a 4.6x optical zoom.
Sure, a lot of people want to boom their tunes across the dunes, but that’s not you. All you want is a little tasteful background music without shutting yourself off from the rest of the world via headphones or worrying that an errant wave or a little sand will send your sounds to iPod Heaven.
That’s where Grace Digital Audio’s $49.99 Eco Extreme comes in. It’s an element-resistant box, waterproofed up to 10 feet, that holds your portable music player or iPhone, combined with a three-inch speaker that provides decent sound without earning you dirty looks from the next blanket over.
The Eco Extreme, which plugs into the headphone jack of your music player, runs on three AA batteries and has an external volume-control knob. There’s no way to change what you’re listening to, though, so you might just want to put your device on shuffle, or create a special playlist — Music to Tan By, perhaps.
