What travelling light means nowadays

Techie Mommy Talks

By JAYE C. BAUTISTA

August 15, 2011, 8:00am

 

MANILA, Philippines -- The world seems to be getting smaller every day, especially for travelers like yours truly.  I love going to new places, immersing myself in new cultures, sights, tastes and ambiance. It gets smaller in the sense that more and more people make it a regular course of action, part of their plans and goals.  But traveling sometimes keeps us away from our regular work grind or for those “Techie addicts”  (Err, guilty!) traveling creates some sort of panic attack.  How do we stay connected while away?  How do we keep abreast of all the online techy action for days or even a couple of hours?

Well, thanks to techy wonder we can all have our just desserts bake it make it and eat it! So long as you pack the right gear you can pretty much go anywhere and still get that all important gadget fix. So, if you’re contemplating your latest adventure, taking another trip abroad and wanna know which tough travel-friendly gadgets to take, get a load of this.

Camera - Have you ever seen a tourist without one? You look around and there’s practically no one without some kind of camera on them.  It’s an essential item to have on any trip! Picking the right one is important too, especially if you're a creative or adventurous type and will most likely expose your camera to non-camera friendly environments. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-TX5 is right on the money and definitely worth a look;  it's not only slim and portable at just 94 x 56.9 x 17.7mm and a weight of 144g, but it is dustproof, waterproof to 3 meters, freeze-proof to minus 10 degrees C and can withstand drops of around 1.5 meters not to mention taking some pretty decent pics.

Phone - One has the option to take a one with you or not.  Firstly, it's a prime target for thieves and second, you might literally want to get away from it all - including friends and family, so taking a phone won't help. However, they can be handy especially when in a bind. The thing to do nowadays though is to leave your expensive BB’s or iPhones and just buy a cheaper one and get local SIM cards.  This saves on the “moo” allows you to stay in touch locally and if you wanna talk to your folks back home there’s Yahoo Mess or Skype you may do from your lappy at  the hotel or call from a land line using an International phone card. If you're going to be taking it into the wilds then you may wanna go for your classic tough phones like the Sonim XP3 Pro.  It has a large range for you to consider as it not only will take a right battering, but it's got GPS built-in.

Laptop - If you have to take a laptop with you on your travels, I recommend keeping it small, light and, if possible, a little on the battered side. At the very top end - you might want to take a look at the Panasonic Toughbook CF-C1; a hard as nails laptop, which would be ideal for travelling. It's not only relatively light, coming in at 1.69kg, but there's a whole lot of tough spec bundled in, so whatever you're doing it'll be able to take it. Pricey though so on the more practical side, there’s the Asus Eee PC 1015P, which boasts a whopping 13.5 hours mains-free action. Not only that, but along with it is 500GB of online storage spellin  worry-free downloading of pics, videos or anything else you can think of, as it all goes up to the cloud.


(To be continued)


Lemme hear from yah: techiemommy@gmail.com