Nothing Insightful

The iPad as a Travel Companion

Believe me when I say this, the iPad makes an excellent travel companion. It’s easy to dismiss what you see in the Apple commercials as being purely marketing hype. All I can offer you in response is a real world example of real people travelling with an iPad. The following thoughts and experiences may not be original or applicable to you, but they happened.

Up, Up and Away!

You’ve probably heard it before: the iPad is great on a plane. Parents preload their devices with Pixar movies and stifle irritable children mid-flight. Kids and adults alike whittle away delays with various games. For me, the defining feature would have to be filling up my Instapaper account with interesting articles, syncing them for offline access, and then poring over these at 30,000 feet. There’s also something terribly meta about playing Flight Control while inside of a plane. I think I tried to avoid mid-air crashes just that bit harder.

The iPad was also critical in ensuring the safe return of our luggage. Pulling up a copy of the itinerary from my email cache helped me when arguing with the Jetstar call centre about exactly how far up shit creek they wanted to place us. Sidenote for Jetstar employees.

Camera Flash Forward

… to the end of day one away. My girlfriend and I forgot to offload the photos of our last trip from our SD card and we were fast approaching capacity. The ideal solution here would have been to chuck the SD card into the camera connection kit and back them up directly to the iPad’s bigger memory. Embarrassingly, I didn’t see the point of the adapter when they first launched. Now I really do. I’ll admit we had to resort to chucking the SD card into someones laptop to back it up.

There is a valid argument for saving the money on a camera connector kit and simply buying super cheap flash memory. But tiny cards can be lost, stolen or confiscated at a border crossing. And if you’re only buying “just a bit more” each time you’re running low, you’re going to end up with a heap of low capacity cards all over the place. The one major positive the connector kit offers in regards to this is the ability to have the the images available immediately for processing on your device. Just pop in the card, sync them to the iPad and back them up to MobileMe or Dropbox. This is the perfect solution for lower capacity devices. Sync, back up, delete. Back to a clean slate.

Over Coffee

Sharing happy snaps had always seemed like a bit of a chore. As a kid, a travelling relative always meant hours of thumbing through albums upon their return. Since we got back this morning, we’ve already caught up with both my sisters’ families. We hadn’t even been home for five minutes, got the call, and grabbed the iPad on the way out. It allowed us to flick through a couple of hundred shots and relive our weekend, all while waiting for coffee and a bagel.

Overall

Think twice next time you pack up that chunky laptop for a short journey. Remember that it’s not just the laptop, but the power cord, the USB mouse, the case, and don’t forget the nosey TSA agent legally allowed to scan through your files. If an iPhone completes your setup then you only need the one charger, the iPad and, if I’ve learned anything from this - the camera connector kit. ■