N810 on the road .....
 

As a selfproclaimed laptop-person it was with a certain degreee of hesitation that I decided to just bring my N810 on this four-day trip to Lake Tahoe.

DAY 1
Checked in at 6pm. Wifi connection at the hotel is working great.
We were meeting some people at the campground they are at.
I got the address of the place, plugged it into maemo mapper and downloaded a level 10 and 6 map.
We jumped into the car and used the gps and maemo mapper to get there!

The nieces of the GF loves the Flight of the Amazon game and spent a good 30 mins playing it while I chowed down some BBQ.

Later back at our hotel I checked emails, played chess (on the N810) with the GF and then I looked up a kayak rental place for tomorrow. Tomorrow I will call them using Skype and my bluetooth headset.

It's late now. GF is sleeping. I'm going to charge my NIT and set its alarm to 8am.

EDIT: Continued:

DAY 2:
I woke up courtesy of the alarm on the N810.
Checked emails.
Logged into Mauku and checked Twitter for a bit.
Refreshed the weather on OMWeather.
Called the kayak rental place using Skype and my headset (worked great). Didn't rent one though.
Downloaded maps for a hike we were doing later in the day.

Later that same day we (in total 12 of us...) took a hike up in Tahoe mountains and when we stopped for breaks I'd pull out the N810 and see 'where we were'. It was mostly just for fun as it was an easy and well-marked trail. But a bit later we came to a cross-road and we didn't remember which trail led to the lake we were heading to...ta-daa - out comes the N810 and I can EASILY on it see that the trail leading to the right would get us to the lake.
Comment from one in the group: "I got to get me one of those"

In the evening: Just checking emails and Twitter.

DAY 3:
Not that much different: Combination of emails, twitter, GPS and games (for the nieces. They now love 'Bomberman and the five-year old is the star at that game).

The 5-year old also really loved mobikid where she could hear herself singing along to the songs.

In the evening I loaded up gPodder and downloaded the latest episodes of my favorite podcasts.

Conclusion of a trip without a laptop:
I'm really impressed and surprised. I went 3-4 days without a laptop and used nothing but the N810.
I found that I did the same - and more - things that I would have if I had brought the laptop.

The obvious drawbacks are that the screen is smaller and the keyboard not as fast (for me). But the portability and the 'always on' wee enormous pro's.

Next time I go away for a few days...the laptop will most likely stay at home.

Hidden bonus: I found that it's 'easier' for my GF to 'accept' that I use the tablet for a bit rather than me booting up the laptop and sit and do things on it. I guess a big laptop creates more of a 'barrier' between you and the people next to you.

Additional things I did:
- Looked up movie trailers on youtube to see if the movie playing was any good,

- Took notes in QuickNote and YellowNotes.

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

thats really cool, it sounds great, the way each thing lead to another and always incorporated the n810, it should be a commercial on how helpful it is in day to day life lol. cant wait to hear more stuff that put all the NITs functionality to good use.

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

Thanks, I had great fun using it. See original post for day 2-3 updates :)

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

Cool idea, silvermountain! I just took a trip & I can't do a day-by-day, but here are some of the ways I used my n810 on the trip:

1. Listen to music & free kids stories (from Storynory.com) when traveling.
2. Use MaemoMapper to figure out how to get to the zoo.
3. Check work e-mail to make sure everything was OK or if there was any question I could respond to quickly.
4. Look up imdb to figure out if I'd correctly identified the host of the Agatha Christie mystery we were all watching (this was a hit with my relatives).
5. Get daily weather information from Foreca that ended up being more accurate than the local TV station's. I ended up being the authority on weather for the group of relatives.
6. Journaled some thoughts inspired by a church service we went to.
7. Used Clock to set alarms.

Kudos to the n810 for being able to do all that.

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

impressive. Reminds me of my roadtrip to miami Fl. How was battery life? I had to break out the Solio a couple of times, when MM decided to lock up and drain the battery.

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

@ silvermoutain where is your original post.

yours is very nice as well buurmas, it would also be a great tv ad for NITs... i like how for the first time i heard some one make a reference to how it helped them spiritually. being a Christian myself and also a person who like to jots down things i may have heard in the sermon for latter reference i never thought being a tech lover could prove useful there, very nice!

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

o
The battery life seemed to be very much tied to how much I used the GPS. If I just do 'regular, non-GPS things I don't have to charge it until the evening and even then there was usually 40+% left. But, with heavy GPS usage I don't think I got more than three hours use out of it. Thankfully, that was just about the length of time I 'needed' it when using it for GPSing.

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

Thanks for the storynory link, never heard of that place before. Going to download some stories for use later this week.

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

Original post = first post in this thread :)

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

oh, Thanks lol

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

I though maiku stopped working due to the Twitpocalypse.

How come that isn't in extras?

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

jalladin, you'll also want to check out Rapier if you haven't already. Useful for fast passage lookup as well as reading.

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

Note: I have young children, and not all are geared toward young children (e.g., a Grimm's fairy tale with someone almost getting burned at the stake, a "chick lit" story with girls wonder if they're ugly b/c of braces or too fat & if boys will like them), so I've had to screen them a bit. But there is a "Junior" link also. The mother of all "free audiobook" resources, though, as far as I know, is Librivox.

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

I too am intrigued by mobikid. I watched the video and it looked like it was in Finnish and fairly incomplete. Is the latest downloadable version better? Are there lyrics? Are the songs familiar to North Americans? Or did the kid you mentioned just like making up their own lyrics to the music?

Re: N810 on the road .....
 

Hey,

yes the 'intro' to the application is in Finnish.

I'd say quite a few of the songs are recognizable by kids growing up in the US. The five-year old was born here in the US and she played, and sang, to the spider song quite a bit.

There are no lyrics per se, the way it works is;

a) You start up the program and there are 6-7 icons, each representing a children's song.

b) The child (or you.. ;-)) select the icon and the song starts playing. It also now records your singing.

c) At the end of the song you can listen to the music combined with the child's singing.

d) If you want to you can now click on the next 'tab' and email the song-clip (to yourself for instance for safe-keeping).

The program is also available here: http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/maobikid800/
More songs would be nice :)