(Originally posted on May 28, 2006 by Scott Bassett)

This Memorial Day week brings some good deals of tech items of use to law firms. Starting at Best Buy, a huge (in capacity, not physical size) Memorex 2 GB USB flash drive is on sale for only $69.99. This keychain drive has enough room to backup thousands of word processing files, photographs, scanned images, and database files. For those who travel often with a notebook computer and want to preserve "face time" with your families, the highly-rated and very compact Creative WebCam for Notebooks is on sale at Best Buy for only $29.99. Finally, the excellent Palm TX PDA with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networking is selling for its regular price of $299.99, but bundled with it (by mail) is Palm’s very useful Universal Wireless Keyboard. For many mobile lawyers, a Wi-Fi enabled PDA like the TX, combined with a good keyboard, can eliminate the need to take a notebook computer with you (especially for short trips).

Moving on Office Depot, if you always wanted a portable digital music player but didn’t want to spend the big bucks on an iPod, you can pick up the SanDisk Sansa 512 MB MP3 player for only $27.99 after $37.00 in mail-in rebates. This player has decent sound and a built-in FM tuner in case you run out of downloaded music or want to check the news on NPR. This player uses a commonly available AAA battery and also plays Audible audio books. If you need a Secure Digital (SD) flash memory card for your Treo smart phone, PDA, or digital camera, Office Depot has a great deal on a standard SanDisk 1 GB SD card for only $29.99 (no rebates to mail-in). I can’t recall ever seeing a major retailer sell a name-brand 1 GB SD card for less that $30 without a rebate. If, like me, you hate the built-in touch pad on your notebook computer and long for a mouse to use when you travel, stop by Office Depot this week and pick up Microsoft’s Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse for only $9.99. I bought one and it works very well. It runs on a commonly available standard AAA battery. The USB receiver snaps into a cutout on the bottom of the mouse for storage and simultaneously turns off the battery. Very nice!