Having lived in Silicon Valley these past few years, we had collected lots of gadgets. So figuring out what to take with us was a challenge. We ended up taking the following:
- Canon Powershot S500 -
digital camera with 5 megapixels, video capability and compact-flash memory. Excellent value-for-money. We've seens tons of other people carrying the same camera all over the world. We added a 512MB Compact Flash (CF) card.
- Archos Video AV320 -
combination MP3 player, photo storage (40 Gigs) and MPEG4 video player. Excellent for storing all the thousands of photos and videos we've taken and also music we've collected along the way. A surprise was how we could view all the photos taken on the camera on this device - unfortunately, we could not view the videos taken on the camera on this device. Comes with universal charger and USB cord to connect to any PC.
- Inland Multi-Plus USB2.0 card reader -
One can plug this into any computer, plug any Compact Flash/ MD/ SD/ MMC/ SM card into this and upload all photos and videos onto the computer. In any internet cafe that I went to, I´d plug in the Archos device and the USB card reader (with the CD card from the camera plugged into this) and transfer all photos/videos to the Archos device, thus freeing up the CF card for more photos. We saw a lot of other travelers constantly having their photos burnt onto a CD. This took up a lot of space and gets to be very expensive. Of course, a copy on CD that is shipped home is a lot less likely to be stolen so there is an advantage to doing it this way.
- HP Pocket PC 4155 -
I took this along, thinking this would help us keep up with everybody´s birthdays, wedding anniversaries etc and also keep everybody´s phone numbers. The device is fantastic but, on the road, it is a disaster in terms of recharging, updating etc. Unfortunately, I forgot to recharge for a few days and all of its data got wiped out! So that was that. I´ve managed to get along fine without it. - Nokia 6820 mobile phone -
This has been the surprise of the lot. SMS has been great - direct calls are very expensive from around the world ($5 per minute in Russia!) but SMS is cheap. The folding keyboard on this device is ideal for SMS. Also, a very blaaah feature such as the alarm on this device was very useful - we couldn´t have done without it - when travelling, there are numerous time when one has to wake up early to catch flights, get on tours, etc. And finally, this does have a calendar feature which was very useful. In some countries, we bought a local SIM card and plugged that into this phone. Also, in any country, you can get local calling cards that you can use from any payphone.
Music & MP3's
On thing that we did for music was that we would create MP3´s from the music CDs we bought and load them onto the Archos MP3 player. We would do this by downloading Apple´s iTunes client onto the cybershop computer and then using this to rip all the songs off of the CDs. Very convenient for travelling as we could now listen to the music at will and also ship home the bulky CDs.
Electricity Issues
A word on chargers, adapters and transformers: As you know, the voltage and amperage of local electricity supplies varies around the world. The best thing to do is to buy devices that have chargers/power supplies that can work with all voltages/amperages without requiring a separate transformer. This greatly reduces the potential for anything to go wrong. All you have to do is buy an adapter kit that allows your power supply plug to fit into the correct shape of the plugs in the country you are in.
We´ll have a few more blogs on packing insights and more!
- Dev
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