Greetings!

I opened this thread to ask for advide-guidance. Perhaps this facts could be of use for someone.

Soon I will be leaving on a 2 month trip; and as I'm traveling light, I want my n900 to fulfill all my communications / internet needs.
For some time I'm considering my N900 plus apps, to be an excelent tool when traveling. This are my known facts and the facts that I need some guidance.

Known Facts
> Turistic paper maps are obsolete when you have an offline gps navigator (Modrana ftw) Just load the maps of the zone when you have wifi and enjoy. I've done it in NY and worked wonderfully.
> Email and msn stuff (no clarification needed)
> Batery life will be more than enough as the gps is not used continually (you don't need to)
> With preparation you can make an spreadsheet file with all the info of hotels and stuff, telephone numbers etc.
> Offline wikipedia awesome tool. best 13 gigs spent on my phone. Do you want to get all the info about the thing that are you seeing? just check it out.
> Size: this is great, you don't need to carry even a netbook.

Facts that I need guidance :
> Mass photo uploader: the camera could get stolen, the cards can break. My idea: make the host mode work, and connect a SD card reader to my phone, and then upload photos to some host on the hotel using wifi).
Any thoughts about the viability of this? Also I will need some online service that allow me for easy uploading. Megaupload has a good limit, but I dont know if a loader could be feasible.

> Webbrowser compatibility for buying air/train tickets? I will try this, but I think as the browser is actually pretty good I think I will not have any issues.

Any advice or comment is welcome

Hmm, things i remember from Nederlands, Vietnam and the US:

- sometimes you do not get an IP from the WiFi AP, whereas the laptop can -> WiFi access not 100% ensured

- GPS fix time abysmal without help by network, better use external BT GPS mouse if you can borrow / buy one!

- Skype sometimes very flaky connection, also remember when you add Skype ID to contacts directly on N900, they will receive an "add me" invitation from your Skype account -> this explains why Hotel skype Account message popped up one day / was trying to chat with me, and i was "wtf!?"

- i was not succesful in my trials to enable usage of card reader using h-e-n and adapter cable -> maybe you are luckier

- tile download using modRana works, but better prepare using jTileDownloader and those instructions on a desktop machine before

- cannot remember issues with browser, but would suggest installing Opera too, way faster and nicer tab / window / select text handling

I would go the easy way, buy a "class 6 micro sd" + "micro sd to sd adapter", so you can just exchange micro sd in the phone when you want to upload pictures.

That's assuming your camera use SD cards and that class 6 is speedy enough/not too expensive for you (obviously you can use lesser cards, depending on your camera and the speed you need).

a portable battery is a good idea also.
with one with 4500mAh you can travel a long way without a need for a wall socket and then when you get to a electric source again, you can charge it again and have 3 full charges again

backupmenu if you need to reflash at all

For mass-uploading of files through a Hotel WiFi, my suggestion would be rsync to a shell (SSH) account of your choice. If you don't have one yourself, set one up on your home computer (and forward port 22 on your router/firewall) or ask somebody.

The great thing with rsync is that it checksums and skips files that already exist, so especially in a low-coverage area, this should be helpful. You could also use ImageMagick or similar to mass-shrink the photos for uploading to save bandwidth and time.

If you can/want to afford it, buy a MicroSD card that has enough memory for your photos + a MicroSD-to-SD adapter, so you can use the MicroSD in your camera and then put it into the N900 for copying - that's probably easier and less kludgy than a card reader.

Also, I'd suggest getting a cheap BL-5J replacement battery on eBay + a wall charger for it - this way, you can charge the original or replacement battery in a power outlet while still keeping the N900 near you (with the other battery in it).

Good responses!

I already have 6 8gb sd cards (planning to take a lot of pictures without downloading), so the microsd thing is not viable. I wanted to upload for the "just in case" scenario.

Regarding modrana, I couldnt get the tiledown working, so what I did is a manual scrolling (with the hotel's wifi) of the area, and that worked.
EDIT: I need to try the jtiledown thing

The GPS lock time is indeed very long, but if you pre-lock with network help for the first time, for the rest of the day it will insta lock, no matter how many times you disconnect.

Good data about the Opera browser, I already have firefox but is very slow, but having another choice is nice for the "just in case"

I have already a second battery and a universal external charger, so I could charge both batteries at the same time.

Good advice regarding rsync. I have already configured my pc so I can access my router, WOL my pc, and then access the pc. But just in case the connection fail and cannot recover, I wanted to have a more reliable choice.
But again I need to make it work with the card reader.

Thanks for your answers

Addentum:
Check also MoNav package from here. It's awesome with offline AND updated routing! And: you can download pre-build map packages. I'm using it right now with US-NorthEast. (In extras-devel, there's only the monav routing daemon.)

For modRana, calculate an route if necessary, save it, and then use "download tiles along route" feature.

checkout the hostmode mod (h.e.n.) and make or find a usb adaptor cable so you can use a cheap usb SD card reader so you can transfer photos from the SD cards to the N900.

Have Upload working to several different sites/services (picasa, flickr, wordpress blog etc). Also email them to at least a couple of good long term friends, after asking them to keep them for you. then if you lose access to one account for any reason, you still have copies

Nothing worse than doing a trip and then losing the photos. I did 11 years ago when digital was in it's infancy.

And test? dry/run it all before you go, so you know it works and how it works.

awesome. Im trying monav right now.