Gadgets In My Backpack

I had a wonderful sabbatical last July. Packed my backpack as light as possible (managed to squeeze everything below 20 lbs) and took off to Peru. So how it looked like from the perspective of electronic devices and what worked and what did not?

First of all - the 6" 3G/WiFi Kindle. It was great to have many books (including the Lonely Planet guide) in such a small and lightweight device. Perfect for long flights (Krakow - Frankfurt - Santo Domingo - Panama - Lima) and for long haul bus services in Peru. Kindle was also giving me a backup Internet access. All worked beautifully. Until I broke it. I must have squeezed it too hard in the backpack or something... Anyway at that point I realized how important it was to have paper backup copies of some important documents (like my flight tickets). Electronic platforms are great. But they are so easy to break.

The second access device was my faithful Blackberry Torch. Just after I landed in Lima, I realized my mobile carrier (Orange) does not have a data roaming agreement with any Peruvian operator. So just had to cancel the 100Mb world data package I ordered for this trip, as the data connection was not working. Initially, as any BlackBerry addict, I was feeling strange when the device was silent for an extended period of time. But just after few days I accommodated to the new conditions and never missed the continuous message reminders that clocked my life in the past. The good thing was there was WiFi almost everywhere. In the hotels, hostels, on the long haul buses and even in the jungle, via satellite. In general Blackberry can connect via WiFi, but for some reason the BlackBerry App World (application market) does not work without GSM signal. This sounds like a ghost from the past and is something that scares me whenever I think of buying a new Blackberry... The way they connect to the world is way too complicated... all those tunnels and servers in between...

Another example of how the Blackberry platform cripples application experience is Google Maps. You would think, with GPS on board and WiFi access, the Google Maps app will work. But it does not. It requires a GSM-based pipe (GPRS/EDGE/3G/HSPA), for some unknown reason. Ordinary TCP/IP via WiFi is not enough. Of course it works this way on Androids and iPhones but not on Blackberries. Scary...

I was missing a way to send / receive SMSes over WiFi. When you are out of GSM network and want to communicate with somebody who is not on the Internet (but has a mobile phone), you just cannot connect.

As I did not take my laptop with me, every now and then I was tempted to use one of the publicly available computers (in hostels). But in the end I never dared entering my primary Google password on an untrusted machine. I should have set up the recently introduced Google two - step verification before I left home. But I did not. Lesson learned and now I have it up and running.

I took my faithful FujiFilm FinePix S5-PRO DSLR camera with me. I was using it a lot, all the time with the attached GPS receiver. It is really fantastic to have all those photos geo-tagged automatically. Picasa makes a great job displaying them later on, with a map, or - better - a satellite photo of the place your photo was taken at. I was missing other ways to annotate the photos on the go too. Like attaching my Blackberry via Bluetooth to the camera and being able to both preview the photos on the device and type in comments / descriptions to be embedded into the original picture files. Digital content creation is still in the infancy. The megapixel race has been easy, but nobody (including the magical / revolutionary you-know-who) really thinks in terms of bringing together captured pixels, location, comments and other accompanying data and making it easy to preview, annotate and then share. Seems like a fantastic opportunity to explore, but unfortunately I do not believe the old school camera makers get it, may be Sony could, but I would not count on this in the near future...

Speaking of camera - related issues. When I have a GPS connected, why the time and time zone does not synch to the satellite clock? Of course I forgot to set the time zone before I left, so all photos are time shifted.

Also not having a backup of my photos was generating me some stress... Smartphones still lack USB host connectivity, so there is no way to duplicate camera content onto a smartphone. Cameras also do not have any backup features built -in. I am thinking of things like a slot for a second memory card and an option to copy everything from one card to the other. This is not difficult to build, but for some reason nobody sees the problem (or opportunity - think "differentiation"!!!) and we still have to use big computers to do such simple operations.

The last remark is about batteries. They do die fast. We took a family iPhone with us. It lasts barely 4 hours when used as a GPS (showing a moving map) or as a gaming console (kids playing Fifa 2011). I was using my Blackberry to type the travel log, and it had hard time surviving for two consecutive days without a charge. The good thing is both iPhone 4 and the Blackberry have a fast charging mode - more than half of the capacity is restored in a matter of 30 minutes or so. But still, taking the Berry for a 4-day Inka Trail trek, I was using it only in the evenings to type down the daily memories, and on the 4th day it was already blinking the red empty battery symbol. A three - week trip to places with no electricity at all would still have to rely on a Moleskine notebook and a pencil.