A Traveler's Technology

  Eugene, Oregon, United States
Friday, August 25, 2006

A Traveler's Technology

While I was getting ready for this trip, I knew I really wanted to keep a log of my experiences and my journey. Too many past trips have come and gone and I have a couple scattered photo prints in my boxes of things, but no real comprehensive account of the experience. I generally have a pretty good memory, so for most of my life I haven't considered such things important because I remembered everything so well. But as much as I try to follow in Peter Pan's footsteps, age really does happen, and unfortunately it has an effect on things such as memory, eyesight and your ability to stay awake through a Jane Austin movie. Suffice it to say, I've been thankful for all the mementos of past trips, so I want to try going the whole nine yards this time.

I was inspired by Where the Hell is Matt? and Me and Chairman Mao: The Blog!, so I started the process of figuring out how I was going to accomplish this Travelogue.

I knew that I didn't want to use a laptop, because it's just too big and cumbersome. Even with the tiny Dell's and Sony's, they still haven't invented a good laptop for travelers. I could probably write all day about that one, but I won't bore you. The device of choice ended up being this PocketPC that we had here at work that was going unused. We got it as an experiment and didn't like for our application at first, so I figured I'd try it out in depth on this trip and see what I thought when I got back. It is quite a burly little unit. A fast processor, integrated WiFi, a thumb keyboard at the bottom (which I already didn't like) and full color display. It runs Windows Mobile 2003 SE, which means I had a built-in internet browser, Pocket Microsoft Word, Pocket Excel, a email client and the ability to play a couple of lightweight games on the plane. I also found out there are applications that can read an entire DVD and crunch it down to about 350MB, and format it for watching on a 640x480 screen of a PDA. And other great feature about this unit is the battery lasts FOR EVER! A full charge will probably last you through more than 12 hours of word processing. On the entire 12 day trip I only charged it twice, and even those times were really just to top off the battery because I didn't know when I'd get to charge it again.



The unit also has a SD slot in the top, which meant that if I found a digital camera that used SD cards for storage, I could do basic image editing (rotating, sizing, etc) on the PDA itself and then post then straight to the internet using Pocket IE or an email client (I ended up doing the latter because TravelPod's email feature worked really well). When it came time to get a digital camera, I wanted SD capability, small and FAST. After traveling with it for 2 weeks, I've decided that small and fast are the 2 most important features (assuming it can take reasonably good photos). Because if it's too big and clunky, you'll pack it somewhere that's out of the way and you'll never have it when you want it. And if it's too slow to "boot up", you'll miss all those perfect shots that only exist for a split second. Like 2 kids bathing in a bucket, or the sunlight streaming in through the windows right now. I ended up getting a Casio Exilim EX-Z60. It's a great camera in a tiny little package. The boot up time is less than 2 seconds (still missed some shots because of this), it takes pics up to 6MP and can use SD cards up to 2GB in capacity. At 4MP fine quality, there is room for about 860 photos. The camera also takes 640x480 video at 32+ frames a second, so it's almost as good as a camcorder. If you've posting to the web, it's more than enough video quality. The battery in the unit is small and also lasts a long time. I'd definitely recommend getting a 2nd battery though, that turned out to be a lifesaver.

Lastly, since I wasn't comfortable using the thumb-keyboard on the PDA, I wanted a fold-away keyboard. Turns out that a company called "Think Outside" makes an awesome IR keyboard. How does an IR keyboard work? Well, there is a little black arm that folds out of the unit and you place it in such a way that it can "see" the PDA's IR receptacle. So there are no wires, no click-on thingies and no Bluetooth to mess with. You have to install the driver from a conventional computer, but once it is installed, it works flawlessly. I don't exactly know how fast I type, but it's not super fast and it's not terribly slow either. And this keyboard kept up with me most of the time. There were times when it would get hung-up or something (I think it was in the PDA) and the letters would stop coming out, but a second later they would all shoot onto the screen like they were all captured in some buffer and just popped out at that moment for some reason. That was a very minor annoyance. The only real annoying thing about the keyboard was that the row of number keys were integrated into the top row of letters. So to type "12", you would need to hole green function and type "qw". That was annoying, but not at bad as trying to use the thumb keyboard (which had an even worse alt-number system).

All together, the whole setup would pack up into something a little smaller than most hardback books, but significantly lighter.

The biggest con to the setup was that Pocket IE is really stripped down from most internet browsers. No flash, JavaScript or popups at all (on 1 web window, ever). Usually I would consider this a good thing, but in my particular case, there were several web sites that didn't really work right. TravelPod is a good example, image upload uses both popups AND JavaScript both in order to work right. So from a PDA with Pocket IE, it is just not possible to use. So I had to use the email client to compose all my image posting (which ended up being pretty good).

Other amazing features this brought to the table:
I got a couple of sci-fi eBooks from a friend before I left and installed the eBook reader. I ended up carrying around about 25 book with me I could read at any time, and it took up less space than a single paperback. While on one of the planes, I saw a European couple traveling together and they both had great big hardback books they were reading. It also looked like they were pretty fast readers and the girl pulled out a second one just as big while on the plane. And I realized that carrying books around on a travel trip is a very heavy venture. A PDA with 100 eBooks is a much better way to go.

This particular unit has 2 speakers on it. One big one on the back that kind of shoots sound out into the room, so if you wanted to watch a movie with a friend you could use that speaker. But there is another on the front top of the unit that you can only hear if you put your ear right up next to it. These 2 speakers are mutually exclusive, you either use one and it's loud or you use the other and it's really quiet. It took me awhile to figure what that was all about until I realized that there was a microphone at the bottom center of the unit. So after I installed the PocketPC version of Skype I realized that with a wireless internet connection, the PDA can be used as an international internet phone!
(There is also a cell-phone like headset jack at the top of the unit you can use for phone calls or listening to movies)