BootsnAll Travel Community

Travel writers - any feedback on what's best for airports, jungles, hostels, roadsides and cafes:
1. Palm Pilot with fold-out keypad
2. Laptop or Notepad PC
3. Pencil & Paper
4. Other

I used to have a laptop a few years ago but the weight and the different power sources issue were a pain.

I hate to see you go,
but I love to watch you leave.

There are some threads about the Alphasmarts around here somewhere....

Court

"Travelling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.'" Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

Yeah I read one about an Alphasmart being a pain because of a lack of USB connections.

Didn't find any comparisons of other options, but I think the most memorable way would be to pull a Hemingway - sit back, get toasted on liquor and put an old-fashioned pen to paper. Putting hand to keyboard doesn't quite conjure the same romance :-)

I hate to see you go,
but I love to watch you leave.

From my “Packing List” essay:

Kick ass laptop - In my case I have the Dell Latitude X200. Technically, it’s a “notebook,” but chances are that it can still out-run whatever machine you’re using right now to read this. Despite being about as thick as a piece of toast and less than 3 lbs, the Latitude comes standard with a 933 megahertz processor, a 30 gig hard drive, 128 MB of RAM memory and a crystal clear 12 inch, color, active matrix screen. The beauty of buying from Dell is that after the basics, they let you roll your own system, so I averted my eyes from the price column and went nuts. No self-respecting geek would walk away without the media docking station loaded with 3.5 floppy and Read/Write CD/DVD drives. It wasn’t cheap, but being a geek rarely is. When your Latitude is docked with the media station, the final product is about as thick as a Krispy Kream doughnut and more dynamic than Batman and Robin on speed. I also picked up a spare battery so that I would have the juice to write for two hours and watch the deluxe DVD edition of “Pulp Fiction” during lengthy plane and train rides.


I have two power converters to share between about six rechargeable items and have never had an issue. Though ask me again after I hit Asia.

I find drinking and typing quite satisfying (and more legible the next morning), though women are less likely to walk by and spontaneously fall all over you if they see you in the corner, drinking alone, hunched over a laptop. Or is that not what you meant by “romantic?” Hint: Drink wine right out of the bottle, rather than pouring it into a glass. Spills are much less likely and messy, which is crucial when you are loaded and stooped over a $2,000 laptop.

Leif

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"When the going gets weird, the Weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson

If you have about 25 hours of spare reading time, check out my full, raw, uncut Western Europe Travelogue

Muchas Gracias senor. That leans me towards a notepad big-time. Now where are you going to be in the next two months? I've got to plan where I can mug you and get that that Latitude...
airfare + hired help = cheaper than $2000 :-)

I hate to see you go,
but I love to watch you leave.

Er, definitely not Romania. No sir, not Romania. Look for me in LA. The dodgey part.

Leif

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"When the going gets weird, the Weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson

If you have about 25 hours of spare reading time, check out my full, raw, uncut Western Europe Travelogue

As for the spills issue - I learned that spilling some beer on your laptop keyboard isn't really a problem as long as you turn it off immediately and let it dry out.

I used it an excuse for my parents to buy me a new keyboard, although to be honest I did tell them I spilled water.

But I would still be uber-paranoid about computers. I'm not bringing mine when I go on exchange, despite the LAN connections in the dorms. Pen and paper is good enough for me - I find it much more satisfying to have a thick bundle of papers than a bunch of computer files.

______________________________
"Never for me the lowered banner, never the last endeavour." -- Sir Ernest Shackleton

It is more satisfying to write with pen & paper but for some reason I find myself girpping the pen harder and harder until my hand starts to ache.

Jeez, I sound like a wimp now :-) Everyone's been writing for aeons without complaint. I guess it's time for another beer... whoops! spilt that one on my laptop. Time for another.

I hate to see you go,
but I love to watch you leave.

I recently dropped an ice lolly into my laptop's keyboard. That was a fun day... All the keys went nuts, despite turning it off straight away. So I took them all off and let it dry out, only to spend hours trying to pop them back on. It's all ok now though.

Reminds me of the time I tipped a glass of water into my hugely expensive mobile phone and had to leave it on top of a radiator for a week before it worked again. Note to self: Stop leaving gadgets and drinks on the same desk.

-edit- I forgot the moral of the story: I'd take a pen and paper.

Does someone already make slim, waterproof shells for traveller's electronics gear so they can use it around liquids, or did we just stumble onto a huge new market?

I hate to see you go,
but I love to watch you leave.

I traveled for a month with a palm pilot and folding keyboard. It's seemed like the ultra-cool, super portable, way to travel and write. It turned out to be a disaster. Traveling with the palm pilot was fine. But my writing went to hell. The screen is so small that I could only see one and a half sentences at a time. I couldn't put anything in context. I tried editing writing on it, but the results made no sense. My first drafts, hastily typed in at cyber-cafes were better than the polished writing I did on the palm pilot. Your experiences may differ.

I'm now traveling the world with an iBook. It's a bit bigger and heavier than I'd like, but I'm very happy with it. Electricity hasn't been a problem. The laptop works fine with 110 or 220 volts. I've used it with some very unreliable power sources and it hasn't blown up yet.

I'm not particularly paranoid about traveling with a laptop. In questionable hotels, I try to keep it hidden, but I walk around with it all the time. Rather than carrying it in a laptop bag, I camouflage it by wrapping it in a sarong and carrying it in a knit bag. No one thinks that it is a laptop. The only time I got really paranoid was after being interrogated by very drunk Burmese secret police. I was sure that night, they would break down my door and confiscate my laptop.

Leif didn't have any luck meeting girls with his laptop, but perhaps he should have gotten an iBook. My laptop is far sexier than I am. "Hey babe, want to see photos of Sumatra on my laptop?"

Cheers,
-Adam Katz :-)
World Traveler
www.geekeasy.com

Hey adamkatz - I bought a Mac laptop, one of the earlier generation, in the US in about 2000. I took it home to Oz for a holiday, plugged it in with only an adaptor but not a transformer and after a few times the whole thing got fried.
So look out man - maybe they can handle the power differences now but I'd be cautious.

I hate to see you go,
but I love to watch you leave.

A Mac flamed out from a voltage change? Was it built in 2000 or was it built in 1986 and you bought it in 2000? There must have been something else. Did you set it on fire maybe?

I’ve said this before, but after a short, deeply paranoid adjustment period, I haven’t been too worried about laptop security, though I have mostly been in Western Europe. The drunken Burmese secret police thing would have definitely put the Fear into me. If you scroll up and click back to my Packing List essay, you’ll see what I did about security. I’m probably going to add to that in Asia, but I’m not sure what yet. I’ve been tossing around the idea of getting one of those steel, wire net things that completely enclose your bags. Know anything?

Adam - My laptop may not be sexy, but it sure as hell is cute and that, my friend, will get the babes every time. Example; put a sexy guy at one end of a room and a plain guy holding an infant or a puppy at the other end of the room an see who has more phone numbers at the end of the day.

Case closed.

Leif

-----------------------

"When the going gets weird, the Weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson

If you have about 25 hours of spare reading time, check out my full, raw, uncut Western Europe Travelogue

No - the Mac was a current model for the time.
Black case, white Apple logo. Bought in L.A.
Took it back to Brisbane. Plugged it in to recharge a couple of times. The last time, the adaptor got very hot, the Mac gave off a metallic/chemical smell, and back in L.A. the repair shop said the whole inside was shot, including all my documents, which were unretrievable.

I hate to see you go,
but I love to watch you leave.

So, what you’re telling me is that after years of enduring speeches and tirades from my best friend about how superior his Macs were over my PCs, that the Apple people couldn’t pull it together enough to build a laptop with a bare-minimum, basic function like an automatic voltage switch??? Ha ha! That’s wonderful! Someone is about to get a ripping email!!! Flame on!

And I suppose they said it was all your fault and you had to eat the cost, right? Right?? Gimmie all the juice!!! Oh glorious day!

Right, and that's terrible about your laptop and documents! Tut-tut. I guess it's just safe to assume that Macs can't be trusted, ever. Yes, yes, ever. Tee hee!

Leif

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"When the going gets weird, the Weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson

If you have about 25 hours of spare reading time, check out my full, raw, uncut Western Europe Travelogue

[This message was edited by Leif, God of Thunder on 29 July 2004 at 5:21.]

I won't give you any more fuel! I'm a Macintosh nuthugger. I like the functionality, designs and philosophy behind the whole company :-) And what about those giant theater-format monitors?
Just wish they were a little cheaper.

...and that I bought my iPod a few months later, since they just dropped the price of the whole range by 100 bucks, and increased the battery life by about 4-6 hours per charge.

I hate to see you go,
but I love to watch you leave.

...and in response to all that...

Pilot makes a pen that is airplane-proof. So it won't skip, like ballpoint pens, and it won't flood the page like fountain pens. And it's about US$8 for a pack of four. Spend another US$5, and you can get 12 legal pads at any office warehouse store.

So....$2000 or $13? Much as I love my laptop, pen and paper is what goes with me on any trip shorter than a month. Plus, it's a lot lighter. And no voltage adapter issues. And I get to improve my penmanship.

Wow, the perks of the pen are simply endless!

--Mimi

Traveling bookless is like Sartre's hell.

I took pen and paper to Greece a month or so ago. It all worked out fine - you just have to accept that you can't edit as you go as much since your pages would be full of things crossed out or rewritten.

Only thing now is I have 20+ pages to retype into the PC. But that's no real hardship.

There's that amusing story about NASA spending a million dollars to develop a pen that the astronauts could use in space. It writes upside down, and in all conditions. The Russians just took pencils...

I hate to see you go,
but I love to watch you leave.

I have a Dell Axim with a fold up keyboard.
Works great with a Wifi card.
You can connect to the net free all over the world.

Have Kilt will Travel

quote:

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There's that amusing story about NASA spending a million dollars to develop a pen that the astronauts could use in space. It writes upside down, and in all conditions. The Russians just took pencils...

---

Ahem...

Urban Legends of the Nasa space pen

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