TwinF Tech Report New Zealand

By: leelefever on January 16, 2006 - 12:18am

TwinF Tech Report #1, originally uploaded by LeeLeFever_TwinF.

From time to time, I'll be posting about our gadgetry and how it's working for us (or not) on the trip. This is the inaugural TwinF tech report.

I cannot get over how pervasive the cell phone signal is in NZ. It is quite literally everywhere and MUCH better than the US, even to coverage within the Seattle city limits.

Having network access all the time means that our investment in a prepaid SIM card has paid off ($35NZ to get started). By getting a NZ SIM card, we basically use the network the same as the locals. We are using Vodafone.

Calls are .49 NZ

Text Messages .20 NZ

Web/Email by the kb

We have been very happy with how the Treo 650 has performed for mobile email and web access. A couple of tricks I've learned to save $ when browsing the web... disable images (a big help) and hit 'stop' before the page loads completely. I find that letting it get to about 25kb is enough.

Speaking of the Treo... The combination of a 2gb SD card and music player pTunes has made the Treo into a great little MP3 player. The external speaker does the job quite well for hanging out in the campervan.

Here is our blogging process...

We take a lot of pictures and load them onto the laptop. Then, we write a post and save it onto the laptop. We then plug a pen drive into the laptop and move the post and pictures onto the pen drive so all we have to take to a cafe is the pen drive. We sit down and immediately start uploading pictures to Flickr since it takes about 10 mins for 6 photos. Once uploaded, we copy in the entry add the pictures and we're done.

Of course most of the blogging can be done just like this post - by sending a picture and entry to Flickr via email using the Treo, which then posts it to the site. If we wanted, we could easily blog many times a day with the Treo. Sometimes though, we want to share more and better pics.


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