Rik's Blog

As promised, another post to update on the nook, and other things..

Been doing quite a bit of travelling lately so have given my latest gear a good trial. First up is my Acer laptop. It's small 11" screen combined with a decent sized keyboard was excellent for use on the airplane. Did a range of things from watching HD videos on the laptop, to doing some php programming and debugging. All was pretty easy and pleasurable to do. Combine that with the 8hrs battery life I managed to get all of my 1st flight of 6hrs, and a good portion of my second one (5hrs) before I needed to charge or switch off. Finally, the ability to play a few games while at the hotel was the icing on the cake. The only downside was the graphics card - it's just not up to most modern games, and while it was quite good at playing the original Halo, newer games weren't so lucky. Might consider an upgrade next year...

Next up was my Nook. There is one serious downside of e-readers! That is they are considered portbale electronic devices and so you must turn them off for takeoff and landing... This is a pain. The main times I want to read are just these 2 points in the flight. Seriously need someway for them to bypass this rule and allow readers to continue reading at these times just like reading a real book. Aside from that everything was pretty good. Got a few free books through various offers, and bought a few. Was much handier to bring 1 e-reader instead of 3 or 4 big books. The GSM radio doesn't work in Ireland which is a pity, but at least I have wifi for when I'm at home.

Up next, my phone. Data roaming is way too expensive. I tried to see if I could get some prepaid data SIM card or similar to no avail. I did get a prepaid SIM for voice - but I didn't find any data plans. The good thing with the SIM card is I am now able to log into the US google market and from there buy and download paid apps! Very handy. Have some handy apps like tripit, and more to keep an eye on travel, and various news apps to keep me up to date, as well as facebook and twitter

And finally, my headset - Astro A30 Gaming headset. I haven't put a post up on these before. Might do it in the future. The really nice things about these are they are not noise cancelling, but at the same time they worked incredibly well on the plane, with very little background noise making it through so I was able to watch movies and listen to music very well. They are light which made it easy for transport, and I like the ability to disconnect the main audio connections close to the headset and store the cable. Particularly handy when going between flights when I didn't want to remove the headset, just take care of the cables.

A final note is how both the nook and my phone charge off micro-usb. This meant I had just a single charger for both with me! Very handy