I have a decent Android phone with 2 extra batteries. Bought fake in Asia for total of 8 dollars. Works fine!

A separate gps Garmon gpsmap 62s which I love. Use for navigation, marking my route and alarm clock.

I ditched my heavy dslr for a small Canon Ixus 130 camera. Better weight, better battery and the Samsung Galaxy S4 has a factory issue with focusing, so 'useless' as a camera.

While travelling I bought a E-reader, and love it! I carried books around, but weight wise this is so much better.

In the last 9 months have not touched a laptop or anything and love it. A phone works fine for everything!

Alex

Still waiting for the day that "Equipment, Communications" becomes amalgamated with "Equipment, Photography", or some other combination as the technology all converges.

Meanwhile, I continue to use all of the above (except Apple stuff), mainly depending on how I am travelling.

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Dave

A phone should be good at being a phone, it may be acceptable at being a point and shoot camera too .. but a true camera should all ways be better than a phone trying to be a camera. Especially in difficult situations. Just depends on how important a photo will be to you. Looking back I'd like to have taken more good photos, that means stopping more often and using a good camera.

So I don't see them amalgamating ... if you are truly after a camera or a phone.

Me? The 'smart phone' is;
a phone
the point and shoot camera (and back up camera)
alarm
calendar
calculator
note taker (either text or voice)
MP3 player (music and podcasts)
a back up GPS/maper
a backup for the paper maps
backup torch
.. and a few other things .. not travel connected.

The wifi .. I'm concerned with the security of that so I'd don't use it unless I know the network.

Weird. No problems with my S4

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Tacos Tyring Travels.com

It's a trade-off between convenience and features, isn't it? My last few road trips, I've taken an iPhone 4 and a cheap Samsung 11" Chromebook. The phone works great for phone (obviously), for street maps when walking, for quick emails, and as a decent-enough snapshot camera for a mediocre photographer such as myself. The screen is too small for anything more serious, so I have the Chromebook laptop for typing, watching videos, mapping out the next day's route, etc.

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Bruce Clarke - 2020 Yamaha XV250

+1 on the phone/ tablet combo. I do carry at least one camera but that's a hobby *

Biggest PITA is buying the things. My tablet is on its last legs. Battery lasts about 2 hours and you need to run the cleaner thing every hour. I can't face having to go through the specs and reviews or worst still having to talk to some Saturday morning sprog in some techno boutique.

* I explained my 60 year old film camera to two kids on the sea front at Scarborough. When I got to the bit about posting the film off and waiting a week they basically called me a liar

Andy

Yeah, some models do, some don't. Apparently you have to change the entire module. Could be done under warranty, but that is over. Anyway, be happy yours is fine!! It annoys me like crazy, every time you take a picture it focuses. . It is tacks sharp and bam, it flicks and a blur!

Alex

Hi all
So this thread has been most informative but I am still unsure what I should be looking for, so here is my shortlist of things I need and I am wondering what you can recommend for me.

I need a laptop, notebook, tablet, which must be chargeable from the bike using a USB cable. I want to blog and as such will need a keyboard, be it attached or wireless. I want to download GoPro footage on a daily basis and upload all things to the blog. I will be travelling light and camping so it could be days between internet cafe's etc.

Do I need an external hard drive to store all the GoPro stuff?

I look forward to hearing from you.........Oh yes it needs to be cheap as well lol.

I am now thinking Samsung or Ipad but do they have suitable plug in bits for camera and GoPro.

Thanks. Ben

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To judge a man by his lowest ebb or deed is to judge the ocean by just one wave

You can charge any laptop from a bike, why must it be a USB cable?

I hate to say it, but you need to be looking at something underpowered and overpriced like the 12" Macbook and it's windows equivalents. USC-C charging, decent keyboard, and plenty enough power for blogging, and enough for short bursts of video editing (not 4k).

Anything else is going to be much more of a compromise.

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My blog about touring and adv riding

Ben,

to help you decide what you need:

- Go record 1 min of video with your go pro at the video quality you like
- estimate how much minutes per day of video recording you estimate you'll be doing
-find the total memory space you estimate you need for your trip:
Total memory size = (memory space for 1min video) x (Nb. of minutes recording video per day) x (nb. of days travelling)

- if total memory size is small maybe you can just dump the video directly from the go pro to usb memory and use a tablet for your trip

if the total memory size is too big, then you'll need to do some video editing to cut the un-needed video footage. This means you need a laptop with a reasonable cpu.

hope this help,
Patrick

Havibg travelling with an ipad previously i found it too limiting (i had a card adapter to load photos from the SD card but it was a PITA to get them on flickr and i missed a keyboard).

For my forthcoming trip i bought this and have been experimenting for the last 4 months with it for browsing/email, on my blog, for photos and sorting video (tom tom bandit). http://www.trustedreviews.com/asus-t...ok-t100-review

I have found it does all i want - good cheap solution. I have loaded windows movie maker on it which is easy to use and fine for my needs. It is working ok with the asus so far - i wil be editing hours of footage over easter on it so will get to test it further.

I bought this to read cards http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00L..._1458370210105 (works well).

I will take an external hard drive to store video footage - still determining the right size.

Hope this is of some help - its a minefield!

Cheers
Andy

And to think I backpacked around Greece & Oz & NZ in 94-95 without even a phone...

Interesting to see the content of this thread over the 2.5 years since OP - tech may have changed (improved?) and more options/solutions may have come to market and prices may have dropped, but lads still have different needs from their devices. So it's unlikely a question like "which xxxx should I buy" will ever yield an ideal answer unless the asker's requirements are clearly defined.

Reading through the thread, it's clear that some guys are happy with a phone or tablet-type solution, and some need more powerful processing offered by a laptop/Macbook-type solution.

I'm an awful obsessive git when it comes to pretty much everything that takes my interest, and I'm now certain that everything is always a compromise - there's never a single optimal solution. The compromise(s) will usually be functionality vs price, or price vs functionality. All obvious stuff.

My own sentiments are that if I'm undertaking a unique and exciting trip, I'll want to document it - I've been a photography enthusiast for 25+ years, and photography has been an aspect of work I've done over the last 4 years. So coming home with great photos is important to me. I'm also excited by video documentation of a trip - We took quite a few good videos of the last few holidays I've taken with my kids were, and those living memories are wonderful to look back over.

So my own circumstances and requirements are that I want the capability for:

• Taking quality photos
• Recording quality video footage
• Storage options for photos and video content
• Some basic on-the-road editing functionality for photo & video
• Full editing functionality back at home
• Keeping in touch with home - both in urban & remote areas - whether simply social media/skype and/or a blog
• On-bike charging/powering options for extended periods away from domestic power
• Reliability and road-proofness of equipment

As it happens, I'm currently on borrowed time with a loaner laptop (run-of-the-mill 2009 Dell 17") while my own (run-of-the-mill 2012 Dell Studio 15") has gone down. Even if that's repairable, I'm not inclined to take it on a bike trip - past reliability issues and HDD make it less than ideal for motorbike travel IMO. So a replacement laptop is on the cards for me in the next year or so. I'm a fan of versatility, so my replacement for my home laptop will also be my bike road-trip laptop.

In photography terms, while I'd love to take my DSLR rig with me, there's just too much involved, even with a "basic" 2-lens set-up, so I'd be looking to a good well-specced P&S, rechargable from the bike via USB cable. My current phone has a decent camera and is IP68 waterproof, so is ideal as a back-up camera.

My video aspirations would be probably very OTT compared to most folk's - multiple on-board cameras aimed to different angles, all powerable/chargable (while in operation) from the bike via USB cables.

So I'd want plenty of storage to dump daily photo & video content.

My current choice of device to cater for all this is an ultra-book. I think that's the correct term? Not an Apple guy, but nor am I a big fan of the latest iterations of Windows. My brother in law is an IT guy and reckons a Linux OS is the way to go for issue-free functionality/operation.

So with all that considered, my research list is topped by stuff like this:

Asus ZenBook (running Linux, not Windows) - https://www.asus.com/ie/Notebooks/ASUS-ZenBook-UX303UA/
Hard waterproof case (as this will be my one-laptop-for-all-applications) - https://www.waterproof-cases.co.uk/p...se-with-liner/
Power supply (rechargable from the bike via USB) - EC Technology Portable 2nd Gen Deluxe 22400mAh 3 USB Power Bank - Black&Red
SSD storage - Sandisk SSD Plus Solid State Drive - 240GB £59.99 - Free Delivery
USB storage - SanDisk 128GB Ultra USB 3.0 Flash Drive 80MB/s £24.99 - Free Delivery

I'd probably invest in multiple smaller storage devices, rather than one large one, and I might also look at back-up options for during the trip.

As already mentioned in the thread - each to their own. My preferences may be OTT to some folk, but they're my preferences and my circumstances.

There may be something in there that's of use to other readers, and any comments or suggestions are welcome.

I have traveled with so much electronic stuff there was no room in one pannier for anything else. I carried a macbook - 15", ipad2, and an iphone. Then we get into cameras, hardrives, GoPros, and the list goes on. Then you need all of the cables to keep things charged. Extra data cards. It gets quite overwhelming.

In the end, I'm happy with just the iphone for general everyday use. I have a case that holds an extra big battery and the phone lives in it. I can go a couple days without charging the phone and have plenty of battery left. I do have to upload phots though for backup, or plug the phone into an external harddrive to save all of the photos. The phone has 256 gig of memory, but I take pictures in the "raw" format, so each photo takes up quite a bit of space.

I am quite happy leaving all of the other stuff home.

iPhone + Kindle does it all for me, phone, photos, GPS, backup via ICloud. alldone on one device. Simple cheap reliable.
Slight compromise on photo quality, but one I’m happy to take.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

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Charles CCM450, BMW R90/6, BMW R50
http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...a/027_27-1.jpg

Qualifying my post with not having used it a motorbike adventure but have used it in some pretty rugged circumstances in Uganda whilst deployed on a training team with the Army.


I swear by my Linx 1010 windows tablet; it cost me about £130, came complete with a detachable QWERTY keyboard and is run off a mini usb lead so could share power cables with other devices.


I actually use it as my main laptop for work 9simple Word and excel documents) but can do lots more.


Mine had 64GB onboard storage and has a micro SD card slot which I have another 32 GB in plus a pair of normal USB ports.


Not sure if my model is still produced but specs for a 12.5 inch version can be found below.


https://www.laptopoutlet.co.uk/table...sc&order=price




its not as polished or beautiful as my IPAD but is considerably cheaper and more flexible to use as a multi task laptop.


regards


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