Hello
Searched here but cannot find a specific thread.
I was in India last year and finding internet cafes was hit and miss. I was involved with a Habitat For Humanity aid project and busy most days.
What I wanted to do was sit down in my room at night and write daily emails as a record of the experience while everything was fresh. I didn't take a laptop with me and didn't want to being overweight on baggage anyway.
So I was left with frantically typing (one finger) when I found an internet cafe. Of course I lost at least one long report when the local net went down...............
So I've been trying to find an electronic means of writing email/documents in free time for later download at a cafe and sending.
The way I see it, I'd need a small QWERTY keyboard, a usb connection, and a USB pen thumb drive to load the information into. But the pc or PDA whatever needs to be small and light.
I imagine many people would like to do this so there must be a simple inexpensive answer somewhere. My laptop weighs 2kg at least - far too large.
Two solutions...
PDA. Quite light and not too expensive. You would probably want to take a folding keyboard if you are going to do any extensive writing.
Ultra light laptop. They are under 2 pounds/1 kilo, but still over $1k/500 pounds. They do have the advantage of doing computer things such as editing photos, watching videos, etc. Again, you would want a separate keyboard as these are basically tablet devices.
I have a Palm TX PDA and it would work well for that. Get a SD memory card and a USB card reader so you can plug that card into a computer. My card reader looks like a thumb drive, but you insert an SD card into the side of it. If you order the Palm TX online it comes with a free folding keyboard if they have the same promotion.
Forgot to mention -- for a small laptop, try a thinkpad X series. I think it's called the X60.
Thanks for the suggestions and that OQO Model2 looks just wonderful. Pity about the price...........sigh. It seems strange that small highly portable computers aren't all over the market. I suppose the Treo/Blackberry etc do the same job.
It came to me last night that a card and a reader might be an alternative to direct USB pen drive dowload, so thanks Boatcrew and Bob. As it happens, I have an unused Treo 600 (as a cellphone it's range was pitiful so I just put it away) and it has an SD card slot. With a keyboard attached rather than playing with the small onboard keyboard, this might very well do the trick. I think I'll compose an email, load it onto a card, then see what I can do with that.
Internet cafes in India varied widely in terms of equipment. Some places I could attach my camera directly to USB to download photos, others the manager did it himself. Generally they controlled (as you'd expect) what was downloaded onto the pcs.
Thanks for your help. My enquiry is hardly novel and I'm surprised that after 2 days of casual searches, I haven't come across any discussion on the subject. Surely the tedious job of typing an email is easier offline in a room, or beside a pool, rather than in a cramped cybercafe in 100 degree heat. Certainly with enough money spent there are solutions but as one person suggested elsewhere, just take a porter along to carry the extra weight. The key to pleasant travel is being light-weight and having very little of value to steal.
I second boatcrew's opinion. I brought both my new laptop and my new Palm T/X PDA on this extended trip, and I cannot say enough good things about the Palm. It allows me huge amounts of freedom, still offers minimal typing even without the keyboard, and mine has WiFi and Bluetooth should I ever want to use it. The ease of using the SD card and a card reader makes it a very versatile system for communication.
Another way of tackling the problem.
You need a Symbian mobile, a portable Bluetooth keyboard (Nokia sell them), a flash card converter so the Mini or Micro SD card you get with the mobile is converted to the size of a normal SD card (but you won't need this if the phone has an MMC card, e.g. Nokia 6600), and a USB SD card reader.
http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/poormanwp.htm</a><BR><BR>As you probably won't have access to a computer with Bluetooth (see the description on the web page), instead you can create an empty text file template with a computer by plugging in the mobile's card (converter if necessary reader) and Notepad.
Later on, on the mobile, to create a new file, you use the file manager to copy the empty text file template, rename it to something else more appropriate, and then open it with the Notes application. Type out the text using the keyboard, save and exit the Notes application, remove the SD card, then read it on the computer.
Be careful with the PDA option, if you go that route, always make sure you backup your files to a flash card, as they have a tendency to destroy data when the battery goes flat.
If you had the money, I'd say go for the Sony UX range, and perhaps a folding keyboard if the built-in didn't do it for you ;)
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