Summer holiday tech

[chrisvenus]

On my grand summer travels I'm considering taking various bits of tech with me and I thought I'd solicit opinions and ideas from people on the subject... Things I am considering taking are roughly as follows:

MP3 player

This shouldn't be too much of a problem. Thanks to ext2366 I have an mp3 player that is pretty damned nifty. Main problem is it charges

Comments

[innokenti]

Well, Vodafone are apparently abandoning roaming charges, so a potential solution could be to get a Vodafone sim-card to go in the phone so as not to put up with faff on foreign sims and the possibility of leaving money on pay-as-you-go cards that you won't use again.

And getting a new sim-card in another country could potentially take a little while and doing the thing several times for up to an hour each... could get quite annoying. On the other side of the coin, that could easily be considered no-hassle.

On Netbooks. The problem with Netbooks is that as a category they are cheap, but within the category, cheap netbooks are /cheap/ and really not necessarily very good. Be this a few months ago, I had a sturdy Eee PC 701 going (which by now I could have been selling for 100 quid or so)... sadly it is gone. If you're going to get a new one, my advice would be to get a second-generation one - any serious problems have largely been ironed out, but with newer versions coming out, the prices continue to slide down with some speed.

Having played around with a few (and extensively with the Asus Eees), I do maintain that the best choice generally lies with Asus. For traveling, you also probably want to get one with a Solid State Hard Drive, which is lighter and can't really get damaged. With that, it means that physically you actually have to snap the thing to cause any kind of real damage.

The best way to choose it is to play around with it - pop into a shop that does them and poke around on it. The variation on keyboards, screens, touchpads and what have you is significant, so you need to get something you can put up with.

I should imagine it to be quite possible to grab a second-hand Eee PC 901 (which is what I have currently) for around £150 and Ebay suggests it can be done. So...

Yeah. Hope that helps!

[hsenag]

I think they're only abandoning them within Europe, and then only for a limited period.

[bateleur]

Mostly correct.

Information here.