Have iPad, will travel...

I'm rather excited, and nervous, about putting my technological bits and pieces to the test. I've decided to travel with iPad (which will serve as computer, Kindle, travel guide store, as well as photo storage and backup) and cameras - with the plan to download pics from my Canon cameras - a G9 and a D400 - and hopefully blog and upload pics to Flickr while on the road in fairly remote areas in western China.

I ditched the Apple SD and USB hub connectors. Since Apple dropped the amount of power one can draw from the USB hub, to stop people connecting keyboards and the like, it no longer supports either of my cameras. The SD card reader does work for the G9 but it has been superseded by a new reader, purchased online in Hong Kong. This has an SD card reader for the G9 as well as Compact Flash (CF) slot - so that's once device for both cameras. Plus, unlike the Apple SD card reader, it connects properly with the iPad cover on - so there's no need to take the protective cover off the iPad every time I want to transfer images. I've done some limited testing, downloading some arbitrary shots and it all seems to work perfectly.

With Chinese plugs points being similar to those in Australia and New Zealand, it should be a breeze to charge the iPad in the hotel rooms at night, and I'll be taking a universal set of converter plugs - that will be needed to charge my camera batteries; that is still on a South African two-pin plug.

I've also invested in a solar charger which is supposed to charge a range of phones and gadgets, including iPhones and iPads. I doubt I will need it, but thought it might make an useful backup if things went wildly wrong. The charger arrived with a pre-charge of three out of four lights showing - and boosted the battery life of the iPad by 20% before the charger ran out of juice. Not impressive, but I'll have to see if it does any better on full charge. It did concern me that charging the solar charger via wall plug after it ran flat took almost 48 hours... Does not bode well for it being of much use for charging the iPad... But it hasn't had a fair test yet.

I've preordered and paid for a Chinese SIM card and bandwidth for the trip using 3G Solutions. The card should be waiting at the CITIC Hotel in Beijing by the time I get there and should be a simple matter of popping in the card to get online.

In an attempt to get around the restricted access to social media sites I've invested in access to a VPN - so with any luck I will find an Internet signal and be able to access emails and the sites I'd like to access.

With this blog now set up, this post will serve as my test to see if I can send a blogpost via email. If that works, all that remains will be to test a blog post with images and to test uploading images to Flickr using Flickr Studio, and to see if I can blog photos from Flickr to this blog.

With any luck it will all run smoothly...