Wireless Travel Mouse Takes Up No Extra Space
I’m no fan of the touchpads or rubber nibs found on laptops. They just never feel as natural or accurate as a traditional mouse and the button placement is definitely less ergonomic.
That is why I always travel with a portable mouse. The problem for the portable traveller of course is the extra weight and bulk involved with carrying another accessory.
Plus, I hate cords so the portable mice I have carried over the years are wireless, either the manufacturer’s own wireless format or Bluetooth. Wireless means batteries which means extra weight and the nuisance of wondering if your mouse needs recharging during a travel excursion.
Newton Peripherals’ MoGo mouse seems to have come up with an almost perfect solution to this problem.
The MoGo mouse is a flat mouse which fits inside the PCMCIA slot of most laptops. It recharges from the PCMCIA port so no worries about recharging the mouse. Plug the mouse into the PCMCIA slot when you’re recharging the laptop and you’re set to go the next you need a mouse.
The mouse has a small flip out kickstand to give the device a slope like a traditional mouse for the user’s palm. Indents on the top surface provide left and right mouse buttons but there is no scroll wheel or slider.
No Bluetooth adapter is included. If your laptop does not have built in BT many small Bluetooth adapters are available.
A more thorough review will be available once I get my hands on one.
Audio Technica Travel Headphones
Here at Portabletraveller we love foldable headphones, especially ones that fold flat.
These new ones from Audio Technica seem ready made for travelling. Especially noteworthy are the relatively large vinyl headphone covers instead of the typical foam material.
Foam tends to trap dirt and degrade over time under heat and moisture.
Replacement covers for many brands are hard enough to come by in developed countries so you can pretty much have to buy a whole new set if they break down in a third world country.
Due out in the fall and available in black or white.
- Reproduction frequency band region: 10Hz-25kHz
- The maximum input: 100mW
- Impedance: 32?
- Weight: 58g
- Plug: ?3.5L type gold-plated stereo mini-plug
Source
SD Memory Cards with USB Connector
Say you're travelling in Marrakech taking in the sites, sounds and smells of the medina and taking plenty of pictures with your new digital camera.
Your memory card quickly fills up and you would like to download your pics to a computer or Flickr. What do you do?
Well, you can lug your laptop and a usb cable with you, transfer the photos to the computer to free up space and keep shooting. Maybe the next best step is to just bring a usb cable along and use the cheap internet cafes to transfer your photos to your Flickr account.
Pretty clever but here's a way to forget the cable altogether. This is about travelling light with a minimum of gear right?
Use one of the new SD memory cards which have a built in usb connector like the ones made by Sandisk. Their Ultra II SD Plus cards with USB are fast enough for most digital cameras and come in sizes from 512mb to 2gb.
Use one of these cards in your camera and when it gets full just pop into any internet cafe at your travel destination. Check your email and dump your photos into your Flickr account. No cable, no laptop needed.
If downloading your photos will take too long just have the internet shop burn them on CD for a nominal fee.
The only caveat of course is your destination must have a relatively high speed internet connection.