Visited the Intel museum today

Today, I decided to visit the Intel museum in Santa Clara. And I was blown away by the exhibits they had there and even blown away by the PDA that they had (in different languages) which was free to use! Here's the PDA that they gave me.



On the PDA were three self-guided tours. In the beginning after fidgeting around, I finally got the tour working. They took away the stylus so I had to use my fingers to tap (no problem, I do the same thing to my Palm since I lost my stylus), but it wasn't responsive right away and sometimes I had to tap multiple times before I got the desired response that I wanted. Several perks happened on the PDA. The self-guided tours were button driven in the program interface on the PDA (it was quite intuitive). What blew me away was the quality of the video that was running, it was simply amazing! And the exhibit information comes to the PDA via Wi-Fi because I noticed the Wi-Fi button was on. So the video pops up when I am right near the exhibit of what the video is talking about. The PDA started stopping in the video sometimes, and a couple of times the PDA just turned off. I tried to turn it on again, but I couldn't. It seemed that after about 45 minutes, the battery was dying and it wasn't being responsive. Ha ha, that's PDAs and wireless for you, it drains the battery really fast (especially if Wi-Fi is constantly on which it was).

So, I went back and told the lady at the counter, and she gave me another PDA to use, and I continued right onto my self-guided tour. I almost went through every exhibit's video on the PDA, so I really stress tested it! I don't think anybody else used as much of the PDA as I did (but me being GadgetMan, I had to!). Anyways, back to the exhibits, there's so much to say, it's probably best to show you the pictures that I took (yes, the museum allows photos!) because it would be too difficult to explain them here. So here are all the photos that I took.

One thing that was really funny, was that I encountered an error box on the PDA, about object not found!



After I finished the tour, I filled out a survey on the computer (web-based) answering about how I felt about the museum, where I came from, etc. And you get a free souvenir (a ball or a pin). All in all, I really enjoyed the Intel museum, I really loved the interactive exhibits. As a kid, you will really love this kind of stuff, it teaches kids about technology. I wish I had this kind of stuff when I was young, it brings the technology to life. I've also made a podcast of my visit to the Intel museum.

Enjoy!