I've got to say. When it comes to packing for travel I have a hard time travelling light and it's not even as though I need most of the stuff. Often I come back with half a case of unworn cloths or unused nic naks. Recently though I've been making a concerted effort to take less of the needless stuff away with me.
It started with leaving my bulky SRL at home and replacing it with a Fuji X100. That thing is a wonderful travel camera: quiet, small, discrete, lovely sensor and lens and I actually want to take it out with me rather than with an SLR where you end up leaving it in the hotel more often than not. It's not for everyone but for me it fits perfectly (ignoring it's quirks and stupid manual focus system).
New for this trip was leaving the laptop at home and just taking an ipad and my Nokia Lumia 720. The only real reason for taking a laptop away before was incase I needed to do any emergency work. I'm really not one of those of it'll all fall down when I leave types but I know from experience that me being able to get into a server for five minutes can save a whole lot of headache. So ipad with and ssh client loaded up and I was set.
One of my main reasons for choosing the Lumia was the bundled maps. You can download worldwide maps for free and get real offline navigation without any extra apps. I've had the phone a few months and am pretty impressed with it. When ever you read a review of a Windows Phone 8 device there's always the line about a lack of apps. I understand that. Yes itunes and play have a far greater number of apps. But just going by numbers is a bit deceptive. Once you start scrolling through a few pages on itunes you do start to see that a large number of them, well they're not all particularly high quality. I think the issue with Windows Phone apps at the moment is that developers don't really see it as a big enough platform to release to in the first phase. There's some good developers out there just getting apps out for WP8, metrotube - the youtube client is particularly good. So far I've generally been able to find an equivalent of something I've been looking for. The one app I'd really like to see come over is the VSCO cam app. Or another photo editor that allows a little more control than the standard instagram, Unicorn fart style editing.
For navigating around it was really useful to be able to pin places on the map and get directions while out and about. The one issue was that searching was a little more limited when it doesn't have a network connection. Generally I'd mark restaurants etc while I had wifi then I knew I wouldn't have to search for them later.
Holiday Gadgets appeared on Pablo Ardila's blog
It started with leaving my bulky SRL at home and replacing it with a Fuji X100. That thing is a wonderful travel camera: quiet, small, discrete, lovely sensor and lens and I actually want to take it out with me rather than with an SLR where you end up leaving it in the hotel more often than not. It's not for everyone but for me it fits perfectly (ignoring it's quirks and stupid manual focus system).
New for this trip was leaving the laptop at home and just taking an ipad and my Nokia Lumia 720. The only real reason for taking a laptop away before was incase I needed to do any emergency work. I'm really not one of those of it'll all fall down when I leave types but I know from experience that me being able to get into a server for five minutes can save a whole lot of headache. So ipad with and ssh client loaded up and I was set.
One of my main reasons for choosing the Lumia was the bundled maps. You can download worldwide maps for free and get real offline navigation without any extra apps. I've had the phone a few months and am pretty impressed with it. When ever you read a review of a Windows Phone 8 device there's always the line about a lack of apps. I understand that. Yes itunes and play have a far greater number of apps. But just going by numbers is a bit deceptive. Once you start scrolling through a few pages on itunes you do start to see that a large number of them, well they're not all particularly high quality. I think the issue with Windows Phone apps at the moment is that developers don't really see it as a big enough platform to release to in the first phase. There's some good developers out there just getting apps out for WP8, metrotube - the youtube client is particularly good. So far I've generally been able to find an equivalent of something I've been looking for. The one app I'd really like to see come over is the VSCO cam app. Or another photo editor that allows a little more control than the standard instagram, Unicorn fart style editing.
For navigating around it was really useful to be able to pin places on the map and get directions while out and about. The one issue was that searching was a little more limited when it doesn't have a network connection. Generally I'd mark restaurants etc while I had wifi then I knew I wouldn't have to search for them later.
Holiday Gadgets appeared on Pablo Ardila's blog
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