Photos and low-res movies are provided by our
Canon Powershot S40. It has some limited optical zoom and is
pretty durable. I've dropped it many times and only once has it
really sustained damage. And then, it was easy to have Canon fix
it under warranty. The best part of the camera is that it is
small enough to carry most of the time. And I'm impressed that it
can go fully automatic or fully manual. The feature I like the
most is the set of pre-sets that are between automatic and manual
settings. The feature I hate the most is that the flash defaults
to being on, so I have to remember to turn it off everytime I turn on
the camera. Grrr.
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Our laptop is an Apple iBook. That lets
us use iPhoto to manage the photos and manipulate them for posting on
the web.
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Our luggage is by Victorinox. Julie
loves how easy they make it to organize everything. I think they
make us look like German tourists. But this is all we are bringing
for a year's worth of travel. The bags hold up pretty well, but need
repairing in India to put a few straps back on. The wheels turn out to
be a very good idea despite warnings from our friends that we won't
ever find flat places to pull them.
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At the last minute in LA, we got a Canon
Elura 40MC digital video camera. I don't have much of an
impression of it yet, but it is very small and lots of fun. The camera
doesn't work too well in the cold and occasionally just spits out the
tape, but we get some good footage with it.
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We upgraded from Sprint to Voicestream, but
by the time we bought our phone, they had changed their name to
T-Mobile. Too bad... I thought Voicestream was a cool name.
Regardless of the name, we're digging the new phone. It is a
Pocket-PC (Wallaby) with international roaming and web access. So
far, my virulent hatred of Windows in general hasn't poisoned my
opinion of this phone.
My experience over the first week of ownership has been:
Customer service: 9 out of 10
Network coverage: 6 out of 10
Audio signal quality: 9 out of 10
Web/email network coverage: 4 out of 10
Device capabilities: 6 out of 10 (I'll never be satisfied until there
is a GPS in there, and I miss the Palm tip calculator)
I haven't been able to get a signal in Auckland, so it starts out with
a bad rating on international roaming. In Wellington, I figured
out how to get signal on the local network: I had to switch to
900MHz and turn the phone off and on. Now the phone's current
network is 530-01-11.
International roaming turns out to be way too expensive and we just
cancel the service after a month.
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We bought this Royal Enfield
in Delhi for our trip through India.
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