What We Travel With
Technology changes rapidly and services that worked well or were inexpensive yesterday may not be available or work the same way today.
Our travel electronics collection now includes a couple of small Macintosh Air laptops, an iPad, an Android tablet, two iPhones and a Blu phone, a compact digital camera and a waterproof digital camera (both Nikon).
This sounds like a lot but it all takes up about a half cubic foot of space and weighs less than 6 or 7 pounds.
Entertainment
While traveling we often find ourselves in media and internet impoverished areas but I will admit it gets better all the time*. We use two primary approaches as we travel. I download shows in my tablet mostly with Google Play or Netflix (many free) and I convert from our movie collection to MP4 and load a travel hard drive. One thing we have found essential is a small plug-in battery operated speaker. The current one is 2”x2”x1.5” and produces great sound (EWA Soundelf $10). Comes in handy when watching shows in bed in the evening on a laptop. We both have tablets and between us we carry a few dozen books in various apps (mostly Amazon and Google books [their apps] and B&N Nook). We do not use Apple Books as they are too difficult to share or use on non-Apple devices.
Computers
Most everyone these days are addicted to the internet and people find it strange when we try and prepare for long stretches not having internet. I have been in a couple of discussions with computer companies about back-up system software in case of an emergency (no longer are CD drives included). Apple once agreed and sold me a system on a thumb drive – just in case. Six months later I needed it and it would not load without being able to confirm the purchase on the internet!! Now falling back on a second device is always part of our plan. I carry a travel hard drive (about the size of a cell phone) with 2 Tb of storage and back up data only from both laptops to partitions on the drive regularly. I avoid backup schemes because they can be a problem if switching laptops.
I had bragged a year ago about a Windows, 2 in 1 laptop that I thought was perfect for travel. It could be used both as a laptop and a tablet. Well it self-destructed because the onboard memory (32 Gb) was taken over by Microsoft upgrades, ran out of room and stopped working because there wasn’t a complete operating system. I had installed a 132 Gb SD card to provide enough storage but MS wouldn’t allow their system to load to the SD card. My son is a computer engineer and programmer and has been unable to revive this device. Please avoid those minimum dive space laptops – there is no way to add a drive…
Cell Service
As mentioned in previous posts we have used Verizon as our primary cell service but we have given up after numerous international travel problems. I can’t even count the number of places we have been where service wasn’t available. The one thing we discovered was that most of the Americans that seemed to be using their cell phones when we couldn’t were T-Mobile customers. Verizon has sold us international phones that wouldn’t even work in London (actually almost everywhere and the battery would die because it never stopped searching for service). Our Verizon iPhones
stopped a few years ago because there was a change in GSM services (we had to upgrade phones).
We now have two newer iPhones on T-Mobile and have three trips between now and December (two cruises and an extended Europe) and will let you know what happens. I still keep my Blu phone on OneSimCard service.
Cruising and Text Messaging
One issue we discover last April with a trans-Atlantic cruise involved texting onboard using iPhones and iMessage. Because of the cost of placing phone calls at see our preferred method of contact is texting. We have
several family members that also use iPhones and texting with them completely failed. It seems that iMessage uses cellular data exclusively to send and receive messages and generally cellular service on ship is very expensive and data doesn’t work at all – so no texting.
The answer is to turn iMessage off and make sure SMS is active (also I would recommend turning MMS off as big photos and videos will get costly). This will solve most issues but there can be some problems if the person ashore is an iPhone user with iMessage turned on. If you believe this is causing a problem the other person must also turn iMessage off to exchange text with you.
We are always looking for tips on travel electronics and are looking into Movavi software for downloading video after another blog suggested it. Any ideas or tricks? Please let us know.
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