I’m traveling in the US this week to go to the Microsoft Convergence 2012 conference in Houston and then to Las Vegas to meet some vendors. This is the first time I have consciously travelled without my laptop on a business trip, and instead, brought my iPhone and iPad.
It’s day 3 and I don’t miss my laptop one bit!
It’s quite amazing what can be achieved with just an iPad. Apart from answering emails, I have been taking notes at the conference, both typed and handwritten using my new Bamboo Stylus that I bought here yesterday. I have been surfing the web, working on design documents (scribbling architecture out on my iPad) and have even started working on a presentation that I’d didn’t finish back in the office last week!
Not once have I stopped and thought, “I really need my laptop to get this done” its amazing how seamless it has been.
If you are thinking of traveling and leaving your laptop behind, do it! Here’s a few recommendations of how to set yourself up;
1) Get into an AT&T store when you get to the US and pick up a pre paid micro SIM for the iPad. They are free, and then you put a $30 plan onto it that gives you 3GB of data, which will be plenty. Now turn data roaming off your iPhone to keep those costs down.
2) Use wifi when you can, even with the sim, US networks are not as cracked up as they should be. Free Wifi is ubiquitous and it’s at that time you want to be doing that heavy lifting – downloading larger files etc.
3) There are apps you will find invaluable. Apart from standard apps that come with the iPad for email and web, I would also recommend notemaster to take notes (I would also recommend Evernote for this purpose, but I find it unreliable when there is poor connectivity). Penultimate for hand written notes and drawings, and Adobe Ideas if you are serious about your drawings. Definitely recommend the Bamboo stylus if you want to do writing. Quickoffice for easy accessibly and reading of MS Office docs, and Pages, Numbers & Keynote if you have to create content. Goodreader for everything else.
4) Get your cloud on! Get Dropbox setup, hook into your me.com account, google apps is your friend here too and you’ll find lots of apps will support other cloud storage such as Evernote.
That’s a pretty good start. Battery life is typically not going to be a problem. You’ll get a chance to charge every night, but I like to carry that charger in my back pack just in case you need to get some juice during the day
Any other suggestions?