I’ve decided to take the laptop with me to San Francisco. My goal was to travel light and determine if mobile devices are enough for five days; my black Macbook won’t exactly fit into a manila envelope like a certain device I’m loving to hate, but it performs a few critical functions and even simplifies packing a little.
- Laptop as Charger — My Crackberry and Touch will both charge from the laptop, so aside from their cables (Thanks, Apple, for not using a standard mini-USB port.) which I would need to take anyway, I won’t need separate charger bricks for them.
- Laptop as Photo Storage — Losing small things is a hobby of mine. Instead of having memory cards floating around, I can reuse the USB cable from the Crackberry to download pictures to the Macbook and process them immediately. Processing the images at the end of each day means having a chance to go back and reshoot if necessary. Not that I take many pictures normally.
- Blogging and Photoblogging — While it’s possible to do both with the Crackberry, it’s easier to do from a real computer with results that aren’t twitter-like and mobile phone hackish.
- iTunes for Podcasts — The iTunes on the Touch is really just the store: No downloading podcasts or remixing smart playlists. I can’t imagine what my podcast inbox would look like after five days of neglect–even after the paring down.
- Luggable Life over Mobile Mindset — I’ve had plenty of conversations about the problems with the mobile mindset lately, so I’m not completely buying into it. These devices are like the original Palmpilot to me; satellite devices meant to augment computers, not replace them. While it’s a nice idea to have my entire connected world with me, concealed, at all times, these devices are still more like day packs than steamer trunks for me. Some websites I frequent are painful if not impossible to use on the Touch or the Crackberry. Now, a 5×7 tablet device might just do the trick …
With most of my packing done a full 6.5 hours before departure, I know I’m doing well on keeping the luggage manageable. It’s worth the extra heft to carry my full digital world around with me, or so it seems before having to pass through airport security. We’ll see if that changes my opinion at all.