Google Nexus One

I get a little gadget-crazy when I travel.

I once filled a carry-on suitcase with computers, cameras and a hideous mishmash of cables, chargers and other gear. Airport security found the roller bag veeeery interesting — and this was well before 9/11.

On a work-related trip to the San Francisco Bay Area last month, I vowed to keep things simpler, in the traditional and technological senses. My carry-on luggage would be — gasp! — mostly taken up with clothing, and I'd limit gadgets to a few must-take items. I mostly kept my vow, though I still had along more technology than average U.S. travelers ever bother to use.

I carried all this gear for a reason: Such journeys make fantastic mobile laboratories for putting consumer technology through its paces. My use of hardware, software and e-services while on a trip is more demanding, and I am likelier to spot shortcomings.

So, how did this trip's tech arsenal fare?

Laptop. A computer is a must-carry. This usually means a laptop, though the unveiling of Apple's tablet-style touchscreen iPad in San Francisco, the reason for my trip west, hints at alternatives to come.

I had been testing Apple's recently updated consumer MacBook, the cheaper, non-aluminum version without "Pro" as part of its name, and generally liked it. My loaner had a few strikes against it, though, including a less-than-optimal 2 gigabytes of random-access memory (you should get 4 gigs for your MacBook) and a

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white polycarbonate shell that can be difficult to keep immaculate under hard travel conditions.

I knew the MacBook had passed the test when it seemed to get out of my way as I worked. Crucial attributes, such as a terrific keyboard, a luscious-looking LED-backlit screen, an extra-large glass touchpad with multi-finger gesturing and a sturdy one-piece or "unibody" construction, all contributed to a fantastic, immersive mobile-computing experience. I can't overstate how good this machine felt on my trip, for work (with frenzied filing of stories and blog posts) and play (watching movies, reading e-books and, most important, having nightly video chats with my 12-year-old kid).

GPS navigation. Despite a vow to curb my tech, I took two phones — Apple's iPhone 3GS and Google's Nexus One, which runs the Android operating system. The gizmos are widely regarded as the top Internet-capable smartphones on the market.

I wanted both phones along partly as follow-up to a recent column on smartphone-based GPS navigation. I had used the phones only in familiar Twin Cities surroundings, so I wanted to put the GPS units to a more rigorous test in unfamiliar California.

The upshot? A tie, I guess. Neither device

ScotteVest's travel vest hides numerous pockets to hold everything you need, as shown in this X-ray view.
failed to get me where I needed to be, except once, when T-Mobile experienced a service outage and rendered the Nexus One inert for navigation. As a relative newcomer to GPS — I don't have a lot of experience with Garmin-style standalone GPS devices — I marveled at how I flitted flawlessly from place to place with clearly enunciated turn-by-turn directions emanating from either handset.

Given a choice, I'd probably stick with Google Maps Navigation despite its robotic voice, since searching for destinations via the familiar Google search engine feels more flexible. But only the iPhone, via a TomTom navigation app, tipped me off to toll roads and other little travel complications.

Audio, video, photos. For audio and video on my flights, nothing but an iPhone with its iPod functionality would do. Getting my audio (mostly tech podcasts) and video (including TV shows, feature films and video podcasts) onto non-Apple gear is a hassle, even though tools like Missing Sync and DoubleTwist exist for this. Video saps battery capacity, so I added Mophie's terrific Juice Pack Air — a combo iPhone battery and sturdy protector.

My trip involved creating multimedia content as well as consuming it, but I didn't want to be burdened with bulky recording gear. So, along with the iPhone and Nexus One, I took only a compact Flip MinoHD videocam along with a basic digital-still camera provided by my employer. This was overkill, I would find, since I ended up mostly using the iPhone and that digicam — and mostly for still photos, even though they take video.

My respect for the iPhone grew on this trip. Though equipped with only a humble 3-megapixel still camera, it has great flexibility compared with the Nexus One because adjustments in exposure and focus can be made with screen tapping. It was hard to take a bad shot with this terrific gadget.

Internet connectivity. I never count on finding Wi-Fi when traveling. To make sure I got online on the last trip, anytime, anywhere, I took a MiFi. The device, made by Novatel, piggybacks onto a cell-data network and allows Wi-Fi gizmos in its vicinity to access that network.

In essence, my MiFi was a Wi-Fi network in my pocket. When I needed to get online but had no decent Wi-Fi access, I pushed the MiFi's little button until it glowed green and another little light on the device began to blink. I then logged on to the MiFi's Wi-Fi signal with my MacBook or iPhone, just as I'd get onto any other Wi-Fi network. This was so useful, with speeds high enough for such data-intensive tasks as those video chats with the boy.

Internet publishing. With dependable online access throughout my trip, I aimed to push stuff up to the Web at every turn, mainly on Twitter. It was simple to do this from the MacBook and iPhone with versions of a Tweetie app or the Nexus One via a Seesmic app. My love for Twitter grew on this trip.

Publishing all those photographs from the iPhone and the digicam presented a bigger challenge because I was uploading large files, not simple text.

I tackled this problem in a number of ways. I used an Eye-Fi card, for starters. The flash-storage card, which looks just like a regular Secure Digital card, incorporates Wi-Fi-networking abilities. Once the card is set up for use with specific Wi-Fi networks, any pictures taken with a camera using the card are uploaded to the Internet destination (Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, etc.) of my choice. There's an Eye-Fi app for iPhone uploading, as well.

Posterous, an increasingly popular blogging service, was another crucial photo-publishing tool. Posting is a breeze: Just e-mail a bunch of photos to a special address, and they're promptly published as an elegant album within a Posterous post.

You can even incrementally add to an album over time via Posterous' iPhone app — but only if that album was first created with the app. I couldn't add to a preexisting album via the MacBook, at least at first. When I told the Posterous guys I craved this ability, they coded up a crude but fully functional little Mac app for me. (They say this feature will eventually be rolled out to other Posterous users.) How cool is that? Thanks loads, guys!

Gadget apparel. Even though I'm a gizmo geek, I have blanched at wearing gizmo-geek apparel — the kind with special pockets for a tech nerd to stash every conceivable portable technology. I'm constantly hearing about ScotteVest clothing, however, so I tried two loaner items.

One of them, a microfleece pullover, didn't seem all that remarkable. It has a few nice features, such as a way to thread iPhone earbuds through the garment to avoid tangles, and three front pockets that unzip to make a big pocket. But a breast pocket was too cramped for my iPhone. The pullover was toasty in chilly San Francisco. Its $60 price tag is reasonable, but it is not that huge of an improvement over regular fleece pullovers.

I love SeV's $100 travel vest, though. This elegant vest hides numerous pockets — 22, SeV claims, though I could not find all of them. I came to depend on the garment for having everything I needed — from keys and wallet to both my phones along with camera gear — within easy reach. It passed another key test: My wife, who once refused to let me wear an iPod blazer in her presence, gave this SeV garment a thumbs-up.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata can be reached at jojeda@pioneerpress.com and 651-228-5467. Get more personal tech attwincities.com/techtest drive and yourtechweblog.com. Follow twitter.com/jojeda.