The Girl with the Insanely Long Gear List
If you've read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (or either of its sequels), you're probably aware of the fact that its characters have a striking and awesome penchant for gadgets. The thing is, those gadgets are from... 2002. While reading through the books, we took the opportunity to jot down all that name dropped gear, and what we've got here is both a list of that gear and a walk down memory lane. Author Stieg Larsson (who was the first writer to sell one million Kindle e-books) often gives out actual lists of specs, which we find to be pretty endearing, but where he's left anything to the imagination we've tried to use context clues to fill in the gaps. Like we said, the action takes place in Sweden in 2002 (the books were published in Sweden in 2005, though Larsson died in late 2004 so they were likely written somewhere between 2002 and 2003), so the options were... a little more limited. There are some mild spoilers below, so if you plan on reading the books and don't want to know what kind of gadgets await you, then beware. Otherwise, join us, won't you?
 | iPod, first generation: Apple's first foray into MP3 players boasted a black and white LCD, 5GB of memory and a rated 10 hours of battery life, we're fairly certain that Blomkvist's daughter Pernilla was pretty stoked to receive this bad boy as a Christmas gift, which cost $399 in the US when it debuted (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, page 74). | |
Canon digital camera, unnamed model - One of Lisbeth Salander's early appearances in the book, the unnamed camera is described as being about the size of a "cigarette packet," so we're laying our bets that it was either the PowerShot S110 Digital Elph or the S200, both boasting an astounding 2.0 megapixels. Take your pick -- they're both beauties, as far as we're concerned (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, page 106). |  | |
 | Apple iBook 600 - Now this is where it gets fun, as Larsson, an apparent Apple fanboy, delves into the specs of Salander's old standby laptop, which boasts a 25GB hard drive, and 420MB of RAM -- pretty specced out for this model (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, page 215). | |
Apple iMac G3 - Salander's home desktop sure brings back a lot of memories, doesn't it? This colorful beauty, first released in August of 1998 and discontinued in 2003, was notably the first to exclusively use USB ports, and its look was... well, just as wild as Lisbeth herself (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, page 216). |  | |
 | Apple PowerBook G4 - The author really delights in this one, listing the specs of this aluminum bad boy. It's got (as noted in the novel) a "PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive" plus Bluetooth and a DVD burner. Salander is also pretty stoked that the 17-incher has a 1,440 x 900 resolution and NVIDIA graphics. And can you blame her? She shells out the big bucks for this one, laying out 38,000 Swedish kronor, not counting the tax -- that's over $5,000. (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, page 216). | |
Toshiba PC laptop, unnamed model - Salander's backup laptop she's got stowed away at home is described as a "five year old" machine -- so we're going to calculate its date of birth to be 1997. If we had to make an educated guess, we'd say she owns something like the Satellite 210CS, a Toshiba beauty which boasted a 120MHz Intel Pentium CPU, 32MB of memory and a 13GB hard drive (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, page 216). |  | |
 | Agfa scanner, unnamed model - Agfa sadly discontinued its line of scanners at the end of 2001, but that doesn't stop Mikael from using one in 2002 to scan oh so many mysterious photographs while on the case (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, page 304). | |
Palm Tungsten T3 - Salander's on-the-go device, a Palm Tungsten PDA, which she uses for various hackery, goes unnamed in the second book, but early in the third, it gets a name: the Tungsten T3. Released in 2003, we might be looking at a bit of a discrepancy, but who can blame him? (The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, page 12). |  | |
 | Foldable keyboard for Palm PDA, unnamed model - Oh yes, what good would that Palm PDA be without one of these bad boys in tow? None at all, that's what. Again, no specific model is named so we've taken the liberty of using the old standard, the iGo ThinkOutside stowaway (The Girl who Played with Fire, page 22) | |
Panasonic mobile phone, unnamed model - Lisbeth uses her unnamed Panasonic mobile phone to send and receive emails from her hacker friends when she's on the go and away from home, so we've just gone ahead and taken a stab at this one with the GD87, a popular model for the time. Looks hot, doesn't it? (The Girl who Played with Fire, page 29) |  | |
We haven't actually finished reading the third book in the series, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, so we don't know what kind of sweet gear details we'll get in that one, but we'll be sure to let you know. Also, if you're into the books, be sure to hit up the Apartment Therapy link below to check out Lisbeth Salander's Ikea shopping list. It's extremely entertaining.
