Are these things exist in the United States? --A separate sim-card that you can purchase without any contract.

You may be interested in preparing (real) 3000 mAh battery (aka dual-scud - with this beast + some spare regular (or also duals ) ones, You'll be probably last man on earth to face power shortage, without need for expensive and unpractical external batteries (+ facing power loss from 3.7V -> 5V -> 3.7V conversion (purists - I used 3.7V just for convenience, I know it's more complicated).

As for navigation, it's of course up to personal preferences, but I'll just say one word - Marble.

No need for long description, You check it, You love it.

Browser thing - microB (Maemo build-in browser) should be able to handle almost everything, but, just in case, I suggest Easy Debian with Iceweasel. It's slower (unless You prepare dedicated partition for ED, instead of using ext* image on vFat), but it works like Your desktop Firefox. Personally, I would scratch Opera or Fennec (mobile Firefox) - not worth installing IMO.

Also - It's obvious, but just in case - I would take small USB 2.0 HUB for H-E-N. You never know, how much USB devices You may need to connect @ once Also, if You use powered one, You can charge while "hostmoding".

For really geeky stuff, small USB wireless keyboard + mouse + capable pico projector (atom?), and You got mobile workstation with ~60 inch screen fitting inside Your fist (screen, not whole setup).

Great responses! Thanks

I understand so, but with difficulty. There was a series of articles on Allaboutsymbian a couple of years ago where Ewan spence was travelling in the states with a Nokia 5230 handset and managed to get a PAYG/prepaid sim card for the handset which he brought from the UK.

In the UK though, free or dirt-cheap PAYG sims are everywhere.

you can buy T-mobile prepaid SIM cards in the US. Depending on how long you will be there there are many options with different bundled data, and theres also a "pay by the day" option for data too ($1.50 per day for unlimited access but speed may drop after 35MB/day). In 2010, I used the latter and it worked a treat. However they've rejigged it and earlier this year I bought another SIM and found that the web page you have to visit to enable the "web day pass" won't work with the n900. Some others seem to have found a way round that, but it arrived too late for me :-(.

See T-mobile's home page for the various monthly (no contract) offers, and see this thread http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...repaid&page=19 for loads of info on T-mobile form forum members(last 2-3 pages only are relevant for current "web day pass" access issues)

For downloading offline OpenStreetMaps, I've found Mappero very useful. It's easy to set the zoom levels you want to download for an area.

Good thing is that maps downloaded by Mappero, can be used by Modrana.

Just get an iphone 4. superior device in every respect. I tried using N900 overseas, but GPS and connections were uttery dismal. Popped in the sim into my iphone, and no problems whatsoever.

I'm looking for this and can't seem to find it. Where did you get this from?

Is it in the repositories?

It's cold evopedia

I like my N900 but I need to make a cold shower.

Month ago I got a problem in airport - registration booth didn't find my ticket and I need to call my travel agent while standing in line for registration (time was short and lines were long).

Result - I had 4 connection attempts to speak with him because N900 often switched to speaker-phone mode and it doesn't react fast enough on my button press - multiple presses were needed and other funny things like counter-call from travel agent as a second call which needs some service (accept/reject) etc. Remember, I stayed in line and hold travel luggage in the same hands.

After this I decided that I should have a simple clam-shell phone while traveling with luggage or ... switch to much more faster phone like Nexus-S.

I am still waiting for N9 as a replacement but if another faster phone hit a market I probably switch to it.