[This is in no way official or approved by my employer].
I'm biased but Google online apps and the HTC/T-Mobile/Google G1 running the Android stack (with Linux OS) have been very useful on this trip. Any wireless access point as provided in most hotels (and even in the Green Island B&B!) turns the G1 in a portable computer.
The qwerty keyboard makes blogging and sending out emails practical at a reasonable speed that would not be possible with an onscreen keyboard. Writing these blog posts to share our trip with you is an activity I like to do while waiting for Min Lin to finish up whatever she is doing or waiting for meals.
I found the best way to blog on the road is to use the blogspot email-to-blog functionality. Using drafts on the Android email clients makes it possible to write my thoughts and observations offline to queue them for sending the next time I have net access.
The pictures taken with the built-in camera are low quality which makes them perfect as a preview to the pics taken with my "real" digicam. Email pics attachments to the email to blog are automatically converted. This is an awesome feature which is actually a lot easier than creating a blog post, transferring pics and uploading them.
Since we did not make reservations ahead, Min Lin researched and made reservations on the road and even paid for rooms on secure sites.
Of course, Google search engine has been useful to look things like "jellyfish sting taiwan" to figure out if I was going to die or not.
Some Android apps are awesomely useful too on a trip. I've fallen in love with My Tracks, which uses the built-in GPS (yes, a real GPS!) to record any kind of travel from hiking to train rides. It provides statistics (such as average speed and moving average speed), elevation profile and of course the recorded path on a map. You can also share the tracks, although that doesn't currently work with the OS version I have installed.
There is also the Sky Map application that uses the GPS, compass and accelerometer to show celestial bodies and constellations names. Hold it up at night with a starry sky in the background and you can finally put a name on those shiny things in the sky!
The future is here and it's useful! I think that there is a lot of potential here.
2 comments:
The Sky Map and My Track app sounds pretty neat !
I've been playing with the Iphone 3G at work and I find it quite useful too, more for the wireless, portable net access and iphone apps than any of the actual "phone" features too.
I don't quite understand how you tied the picture attachment to your blogpost... I guess it just appends the picture at the top of the post ? I wonder if I could do it with the Iphone or my cellphone...
Yes, you should be able to take advantage of the email-to-blogpost functionality from any email client that lets you add attachments.
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