Crave Essentials: Travel tech we love
Crave spends a good deal of its time on the road. Here's a look at some of our personal favourite gadgets that keep us going when we're out and about
In order to give you all the latest and greatest tech news, Crave has to travel far and wide. Thirty years ago, travelling around the world and getting pictures and text back to the mother ship would have been a daunting task.
Fortunately, we're blessed with more gadgets and gizmos than you can shake a gerbil at. Here at Crave we all have our favourite bits of travel tech, but this morning we sat in the Crave pod to discuss which devices would make the perfect on-the-road companions.
First up is the mightily attractive Asus U1 laptop. It's tiny, it's shiny, it's got leather, it's got Vista -- what's not to love? The Asus U1 offers Core Duo performance in a petite package, along with a lovely 11-inch screen, an insignificant 1kg weight and the brand-new Windows OS.
But what's a laptop without a data connection? Behold the Vodafone Mobile Connect USB Modem. It couldn't be easier to install, delivers solid 3G data communications and is straightforward to configure. It's also smaller and easier to carry than a PC Card, and requires minimal technical competence to use.
Next we need a camera to take pictures of everything we see and the Nikon D80 is Crave's top pic. This new 10-megapixel dSLR is a massive hit. It offers the obligatory 64mm screen and a pile of in-camera editing and custom functions.
Communication is key when we're out and about, so we don't mess around with a funky feature-rich phone: we want something straightforward with good battery life and it doesn't get better than the O2 Jet. It might seem like a boring and chunky phone, but it really delivers in the battery department and the keypad and menu are very easy to use.
All work and no play makes Crave an unhappy nebulous entity, so we make sure to take a good selection of toys too. The DS Lite is an aesthetic improvement over the original DS and comes with a plethora of fun games. For music and videos we use the Archos 604 WiFi, which is completely stacked with great video playback, Web surfing and other useful features.
In order to listen to all our music and videos we love the Shure E500PTH noise-cancelling headphones, which make ordinary earphones sound utterly useless in comparison. They're extremely pricey and a complete pain to wear, but it's by far the best solution if you want to listen to music with no compromises.
Of course, we need a bag to carry all this kit in and the Crumpler Ripper Tripper not only protects the laptop, but also comes with a dedicated dSLR camera pouch that will protect the D80 against most of the elements -- including a random Asimo attack. Sorted. -AL