My trusty Palm m125 plugged into the amazing fold-out Palm keyboard
Remember the adverts in the early 1980s for the portable Osborne computer? The one that managed to pack a computer, screen, power supply and floppy drive into a suitcase-sized package? All I can remember is that the woman who held the computer in the adverts not only had the slightly strained look of someone smiling through a particularly boring cocktail party story, but she had the whitest knuckles I've ever seen. She's probably suing for stress-induced arthritis as we speak.
But these days you don't have to lug a suitcase around if you want computing power on the move. I spent three years travelling through all sorts of rough areas of the world, and everywhere I went I carried a palmtop computer that I used for everything from email to expenses. Recently, during a long trip through West Africa, I took an even more sophisticated system, and it won't be long before a worldwide, always-connected pocket computer solution is a reality. Now there's a thought...
My Current Travelling Kit
If you want to take a Palm travelling, make sure you buy a good case for it
By the time I came to my trip through West Africa in 2002-2003, the computer I'd taken on my previous trip had long since floated up to the great computer junkyard in the sky. I needed a more modern solution, and decided to go for a slightly different tack.
Back in 1995, when I'd first set off on a computer-assisted trip, nobody was emailing from the road, and internet cafés were pretty thin on the ground, so I had to take my own internet solution. These days things are completely different, and you can find internet cafés everywhere; indeed, in poorer countries they are even more common than in rich ones, as they're often the only affordable way for locals to get online. With this in mind, I decided not to take a modem, but instead decided to concentrate on a decent portable solution that I could easily hook up to the PCs I'd find en route.
So, for my 2002-2003 trip, my computer kit was made up of the following:
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The combined size and weight of the Palm and its keyboard is negligible
A Palm m125. To be honest, there's not a lot to choose between Palm machines and those running Pocket PC, but I've always used Palms, I know how they work, and I knew they'd do the job. I chose the Palm m125 because it was the only model that had the features I needed. I wanted a model that used normal AAA batteries rather than rechargeable ones (recharging on the road can be a pain, but you can buy AAA batteries everywhere), and I wanted to have some kind of backup system; the m125 takes normal batteries and has a slot for SD cards, and it's the only Palm that has both. That made choosing a model decidedly easy.
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A Palm fold-out keyboard. You're never going to manage much writing on a Palm without some kind of keyboard, and the Palm keyboard is a masterpiece of lightweight, quality design. I typed over 125,000 words on it in just under four months, I lugged it through dusty deserts and humid tropical jungle, and it behaved impeccably, just like the Palm itself.
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A normal serial cable. Most Palms come with a USB cradle, but if you're travelling it's much better to have an older, RS-232 cable; not only is it lighter because it doesn't come with an unnecessary cradle, but it fits older machines without USB ports, and off the beaten track in places like Mali and Burkina Faso, that's a serious bonus.
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You can even combine the Palm with a Bluetooth phone for a complete wireless email and surfing solution, though this is only a realistic solution in countries with good mobile phone networks
Software. For word processing, I used the fantastic WordSmith from Blue Nomad Software. This is effectively a cut-down version of Word that works like a dream (it didn't crash once in all that typing) and I can't recommend it enough. The other piece of software I took was a transfer program called SyncWizard, a very simple shareware program that fits on one floppy disk, and is much easier to install and remove than the clunky Palm transfer software. It enables you to copy files directly from your Palm to a Windows PC, so I'd simply copy my writing into the Memo Pad application on my Palm, and use SyncWizard to copy the MemoDB file onto the PC. It worked every single time in West Africa, which I think is seriously impressive.
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Cases. To protect your investment, I highly recommend cases for both Palm and keyboard. You can get hard cases, waterproof cases, leather cases and goodness knows what other kinds, so pick the most suitable one for your expected environment. Cases can also have the handy side-effect of making your expensive computer look much cheaper, which is useful in the developing world, when your Palm may be worth more than a year's salary for those living there.
Given this kit, you can easily write anywhere and copy your stuff to PCs in internet cafés. If the thought of installing software and plugging cables into strange computers gives you the heebie-jeebies, then it's not essential; a Palm, a keyboard, WordSmith and a couple of SD cards would do the job, and as long as you do regular backups and secrete the tiny cards somewhere unlikely to be raided, you can probably wait until you get home to copy your writing to your PC. I ended up ftp-ing my files directly to my website, so friends and family could read them at their leisure, but that's a whole other story...
My Previous Travelling Kit
My old Psion-based travel kit
For my 1995-1998 trip, my computer kit was made up of the following:
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An Acorn Pocket Book II. This palmtop was based on the Psion 3a but had some software changes to make it more suitable for the education environment. I preferred it because it had a thesaurus built into the word processor, which the Psion 3a didn't.
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A Psion 3Fax modem. Not exactly one of life's fast modems, the 2400-baud 3Fax was even laughably slow back in 1995. Then again, for sending pure text it was bearable, and its slow speed ensured it was reasonably reliable over public phone lines.
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A TeleFast acoustic coupler. This nifty little piece of kit from TeleAdapt enabled me to attach my modem to any handset in the world (assuming that the humans in that country have ears and mouths in the same places that we do in the West, which is a pretty safe bet). This has now been replaced by the TeleFast Plus from the same company.
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An ISP. For my ISP I used CompuServe, which I could access via local (or at the worst, national) calls in almost every country on my route, and could send and receive email fairly easily throughout the trip. The big problem was India, where CompuServe didn't have a node, but I simply learned to live without it. (I could have rung Kathmandu or Colombo if I had been desperate, but I wasn't.)
Just for the record, I typed around half a million words on that tiny keyboard over three years; that's about the same as four or five reasonably sized novels. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, but having tried both computers, I'd much rather use a Palm keyboard than a Psion one. My thumbs are still aching...
Don't Get Addicted!
Technology on the road is fantastic, when it works. My first machine died in the middle of Sulawesi, however, where Acorn stockists aren't exactly common. (Hey, they're not common anywhere.) This is what I wrote in my travelogue at the time:
It was then that my computer died from the same disease that had struck it down in New Zealand: a cracked screen cable. If I had known how long I'd have to wait for a replacement, despite the best efforts of Acorn, it would have sent me into a wave of panic: I've become so used to travelling with the convenience of dynamic budgeting, the ability to keep my travelogue going without having to worry about the constraints of pen and paper, the ease of having all my information available in one place, that life without my little machine is considerably more difficult.
So I kept my travelogue as a series of memory-jogging notes in a pad, ready to sit down and type away as soon as I got to Yogyakarta, the place I thought I'd resurrect the poor, wee beastie. Sadly, it wasn't until Singapore that I became electronically sound again, so for this section of the travelogue I'm working from memories that are up to a month old. Hopefully it won't be too obvious, but I just know I'll have forgotten so many little details that would normally be rushed down into electronic form as soon as they occur to me. Technology is a great enabler, but take it away and the user is worse off than they would have been before: I simply can't write on paper any more, unless it's a short letter. The thought of ink and processed tree, of not being able to cut and paste, to change words millions of times, to check the spelling, to back up what I write, to email the result home... it scares the hell out of me!
The replacement almost died in Diu, but luckily I was able to fix it. The moral of the story is, don't get too dependent on your machine – always carry a pen and paper.
