in|ad|ae|qu|at

• You write to your own Blog daily ? fine .
• You like to compose comprehensive blog entries , with plenty of links , pictures , formating , tags and comments ? good .
• You have high-speed internet , a decent computer with 19″ screen and plenty of storage at home ? great .
• You are about to make a journey and think “…well , I could do a little blogging on the way , nothing fancy , just some words here and there , so people out there know that I am still alive…” OK !

This was exactly how we started our Route 66 adventure , so let us give you a real- world report about what REALLY happens once you are “in the wild” and think about keeping up your posting habits ( Surgeons Warning: Blogging on the Road can seriousely damage Your Nerves ! RED PILL MODE !!! )

First , those were our assumptions about equipment and facility availability along The Route :

• we thought our 15,4″-Laptop would be overkill for the journey : It is heavy and we would have to carry it around on every walk ( Mom’s & Dad’s Advice : Don’t leave an expensive laptop in the car ! ) , it needs recharging every 2 hours ( B sure the current runs out two minutes before you finish your posting ) , it would distract us from the joys of travelling ( by offering too many options and supporting our Internet addiction )
• we thought “America is the holy land of the Internet, there will be Internet Cafes on every corner in every town”
• we took along our beloved analog camera for photos, as digital photography still felt like a fast-food concept : point- shoot- delete
• we took along our mobile phones only for rare emergency calls , as the phones are SIM- locked to our local provider and could not easily be converted to a US SIM card

Next , we added some “nice to have” features to our wish list :

• some small device to take notes and write small postings on the road for those supposed rare cases when no Internet Cafe would be available
• mhhh , three weeks on Route 66 : a GPS navigation system would surely come in handy at some point …
• thinking about expensive phone calls on roaming networks : we use SKYPE @ home , so why not use SKYPE for this task … ?

After some extensive gadget research , the NOKIA N800 came up on our radar . It is marketed as an “Internet Tablet” with a 800×640 touch screen , WLAN , bluetooth , SD-Card slots and a very geeky LINUX operating system , mhh , € 290.-, mhhhh … Wait a minute : With the software update coming in July 2007 , there would be a SKYPE client and a GPS kit named NAVICORE was also available … sounds great , doesn’t it ? - All our extra features covered inside one tiny , lightweight , long- running , not-too-expensive device … This is it !

Unfortunately , the device and the GPS kit was not available locally until one week before departure , and we wanted to have the USA GPS maps on the device anyway . Let’s buy it in CHICAGO on the first day of our journey ! - YEAH ! - This is a real plan ! ( Plus : kap might have a not toy to play with on those long empty enenings out there in the deserts of Far West , Anm. d. Setzers ) . So we pre- ordered the N800 plus NAVICORE GPS kit in the NOKIA flagship store in Chicago , making sure they understood that we needed to have the unit working fully functional with all those features before we left the shop , and - after some email exchange - those guys seemed quite cooperative and understanding . Great !

On day # 1 of our journey the very first thing we did was to sneak into the N- store anxiousely asking if anyone new about our pre- order … ? - YES , they had the N800 and the NAVICORE ready , additionally we purchased a NOKIA Bluetooth keyboard to make it easier for us to write text entries … the store people were VERY helpfull ( rewarded by some Mozartkugels which EZly passed US VISIT Arrival Process @ O’ Hare ) , and after 1 hour of unpacking, downloading the new firmware , installing the GPS etc. we left the store very happy ( czz , as always , rather sceptical ) and excited .

Those were the impressions after the maiden trip :

• the GPS worked like a charm , a separate Bluetooth GPS receiver reports the position to the N800 , which shows the map and the route directions . Nice . The screen of the N800 is REALLY small , one has a hard time reading web pages - well , this is the price for a small and lightweight device , but anyway , we would not use it to blog a lot anyway thanks to All tomorrow’s Parties Internet Cafes …
• battery life prooves to be of reasonable endurance ( 6 hours ) , Internet access was EZ via WLAN , and via bluetooth we could connect to both our NOKIA mobile phones - 6310i and N70

There we go travelling Route 66 and write some small postings along the way . Watch out - there are many picturesque billboards , ruins , neons , old cars , nice landscape : Why not take some quick pictures with our cameraphones . More quick pics … and more . And why not take down some impressionistic notes 4 The Blog ? And some additional pieces of info 4 further PITSTOP- postings ? - JFTR ? - Lovely !

To make a long story short : ATEOTD we have taken than 2.000 digital pictures , have written 35 enxtended blog entries , and have wasted countless hours to figure out problems with the N800 . Here is a list of our “lessons learned” , just in case you care :

1. never assume you can write a “small” ( tumblr- sized ) blog entry once you are used to comprehensive blogging . You wanna add Links, Photos and take care of decent formatting once you are into serious blogging
2. never assume a slow internet connection , a small screen or a simple offline- blogging application “can do the job” once you are spoiled with your home setup … It just is a pain in the a*** ( PITA ) to wait 30 seconds for a page to load , to not be able to use thumbnails , to have a browser without tabbing …
3. the N800 has a very basic browser , which does not play together with our WORDPRESS online- CMS happily , there are scrolling issues , buttons missing , and just generally a nerve- wracking experience
4. there are no decent offline- blog- editors for the N800 , so our posts needed a lot of fine- tuning before and after publishing
5. always keep the time + date of your digital camera up- to- date , even more so if you are using two independent cameras : It is a nightmare to sort out which photo was taken where due to a mixture of unsynchronized date + time on two cameraphones !
6. there are NO INTERNET CAFES at all in smalltown America . Exclamation Mark . Even in Chicago we only saw 1 , and not a single one after this on our 2.500 mile trip .
7. Free WLAN Internet access is quite common and was available in most of our hotels . In one case they offered wired access ( Ethernet ) which we could NOT use with the N800 , in two cases the access fee was $9,90 for 24 hours
8. the “Office Space” in most hotels is a joke ( and a bad one, too ) and materializes itself very often in one antediluvian & slow PC beneath the lobby , occupied by kids hangig out , chatting with their buddies or checking their MYspace accounts
9. If your GPS uses separate location maps for East and West USA , do not forget to switch over at the border between Illinois and Missouri ! I was VERY angry at poor NAVICORE for two days , as it showed only main streets in Missouri and Oklahoma before I found out about the switching thing . ( The device had worked well @ Chicago and Illinois where we started off . )
10. do not understimate how much you are used to your big screen and your local keyboard layout . we almost ruined our eyes on the small screen , and had to retype thousands of symbols because of the US- style keyboard
11. combining smoking and blogging in the USA means sitting outside , usually in bright sunlight , this is not a recommended setup for small screens like the N800 . ( Next time , we go to Alaska . Or Scotland . )

TTYTT , we wrote ALL our On- the-Road- blog entries via nano N800 , with numerous lockups , sacrifice of nearly- completed postings and confused fumbling on zooming in / out , switching applications and trying out all the halfway- working offline- editors . We used WORDPY mainly after having installed Python 2.5 successfully, and it works so so là là , but can not be compared to any home- sweet- home- setup . KWIM ?