Three years ago we must have packed and carried twenty pounds of technology on our Excellent Adventure to Europe. This year we will pack and carry less, but in fact have more technology at our fingertips. It would be even more so if our cell phones worked in Europe. But alas, we have Verizon, which is great in North America, but non-operational anywhere else.
Last time we carried a 5.5 pound computer; this year a far better machine is less than three pounds. Last time we took a backup hard drive and a DVD burner for additional backups. This year we will back up to the ‘cloud’.
The camera we took last time weighed several pounds. This year we are going to use a point-and-shoot with better resolution, a fair amount of manual control and several more features, including in-camera panoramas.
The computer is a Samsung 9. It has a solid-state disk (SSD) so it boots crazy fast. You can see the very large touch pad in the photo; so no mouse to carry. It runs Windows 7 and is effectively the Windows equivalent to the MacBook Air. The only complaint is that the touch pad is really, really sensitive. I’m frequently surprised to have made a mouse press when I did not mean to.
Aside from that, I love having the flip-it-open-and-use-it convenience MacBook users have.
We’ll use Dropbox for storing photo backups. If you don’t have Dropbox, get it. I can pop photos onto Dropbox and she can access them with her iPad. Or cell phone, except we won’t have our cell phones. As previously, we’ll publish some of our photos to Smugmug.
For a camera, we will be using a Sony DSC-H55. This camera takes great pictures and even does panoramas inside the camera.
The car will have satellite navigation, so the only bummer will be not having our cell phones. I think about how nice it would have been to have maps on a cell phone the last time we were exploring cities. A friend loaned us an unlocked Android phone. We’ll see if we can get a month-long voice and data plan from T-Mobile or one of the other European vendors.
So that’s it, fewer items, less weight and more functionality. I love technology!