Background
When traveling, I usually bring a laptop, iPod, digital camera, and digital camcorder. For each of these, there are a variety of accessories for power, cables, and memory. On a recent trip to Ireland, I decided to bring a GPS unit for car navigation. After a long search, three options emerged;
a. Garmin 670 with Europe & US maps
b. Nokia N800 Internet tablet with Wayfinder maps and bluetooth GPS
c. Macbook with Parallels, Windows Vista, a USB GPS, and Microsoft Autoroute for Europe
I ended up going with option b. thinking I would have the best of a. & c. with less travel bulk.
Results
The Nokia N800 is a fun little gadget and a close replacement to a Garmin unit. The interface is a little worse but it does allow you to do surf the web in a coffee shop then continue walking using the GPS. My wife thought having the GPS reduced the stress of car travel in a foreign country as she does most of the navigating. The N800 is less of a laptop replacement due to it’s awkward keyboard (external bluetooth could be used) and inability to connect directly to ethernet provided in most hotels.
Learnings – Connectivity
Free Wifi can be difficult to impossible to find outside major cities. The N800 came with a 30 day trial of Boingo Mobile (subsequent months are $8). Boingo allows you to use pay hot-spots around the globe like those at Starbucks or British telecom. It can be difficult to find the hotspots as Boingo only lists them online (which kinda defeats the purpose). Furthermore, this service is $40 a month if you use a laptop. Most mid-level hotels seem to supply only ethernet in rooms. A laptop or hub is needed.
Learnings – Backup
I typically try to backup digital photos on the road. Without a laptop, I couldn’t use a service like Jungledisk or even the laptop. If I stay with this non-laptop configuration, I could get a large SD card and copy pictures between the 2 SD slots in the Nokia N800.
While trying to backup, I mistakenly deleted all the files on a 2GB SD card. I did find a free utility that would recover the pictures but I required you to be logged in with Admin priveleges in Windows. Most hotels/internet cafe’s do not allow you to have admin priveledges so I sweated it out until I returned home. Undelete for an SD Card (or any disk) – free from Roadkil.net
Easiest would be to bring a laptop. Many of our frustrations could have been reduced if we brought a Macbook. Also, pictures and video could have been processed on the plane.
Here are all the Ireland expenses.
