In July I spent a month backpacking through England and Scotland. Unlike my trip a year and a half ago where I carried a camera and a netbook, this time I travelled with only my Android Nexus One phone running Froyo (2.2). Here are my observations on how that worked out.

Network

As soon as I landed in London I dropped into the first mobile store that I chanced across. Through a foggy jet-lagged haze I discussed my needs and ended up purchasing a one month pay-as-you-go plan from O2 for about $17. This included a sim card, $17 worth of talk time, 300 text messages and 500 megs of GPRS/Edge data. I could have added 3G coverage for another $17 but given where I would be travelling I figured the 3G coverage would be pretty spotty and that I could instead complement it with wifi which is what I'm used to doing here in Canada.

This got me going and I spent the next day doing the quick tour of London and testing it out. I had some initial success with Google Buzz updates and no problems with reading e-mail, twitter & reddit updates and working with google maps, although the map tiles could be frustratingly slow to load.

Battery

I brought along a Duracell battery booster which would give me about a 65% change. This proved to be very useful especially on those days where we relied upon turn-by-turn navigation a lot. Most days I was able to get through a full day of picture-taking and navigation with a little light web browsing.

Photography

This was my camera for the whole trip and I ended up shooting about 1500 pictures of which I kept approximately half. I have uploaded 90-odd of the best to a public album on Picasa which you are welcome to view. All cheap digital cameras suffer from poor contrast performance and the Nexus One is no exception. Fortunately you can manage this somewhat by utilizing the manual exposure compensation settings but they really need to provide half or third stop increments instead of the current full stop. Other than that I was fairly pleased with the results, especially the automatic geotagging. The Gallery app on Android still needs some work - a few times it wouldn't show my newest shots, a few times it slowed to a crawl and once it even caused the whole phone to re-boot - yikes!

Navigation

Google Navigation was amazing for those times when we rented a car. In spite of getting confused and leading us to the wrong destination once we were extremely happy to have it telling us where to turn. I had really hoped it would assume a Scottish accent when we left Glasgow in out little rental but alas it did not. I used standard google map queries many times a day to orient us especially when navigating the bigger cities, none of which are laid out in a standard North Amercian grid.

Buzz

I decided to give Google Buzz a try for my 'on the road' updates. I can't say that it worked that well with the slow GPRS connection I had, mostly failing to upload images and many times reporting that a post had failed when it fact it hadn't. When it worked it did provide nice integration by automatically droopping attached pictures into my Picasa web album but even then it would downscale and strip out the image's meta-data while doing that. There should be an option to do that (or not!)

Remote Access

I was able to upgrade my servers and work on websites via the ConnectBot shell, as well as manage a variety of issues through the Dreamhost web-panel and transfer money through my credit union, using the Dolphin broswer. Horray for being able to manage so much from one small device. Obviously it would wouldn't be sufficient for full scale day-to-day web development but it was certainly fine for what I asked of it and did more than I expected it would be able to handle.

Summary

I remember reading an interview with Cory Doctorow before I left, where he claimed that he was getting several hours more sleep a night and eating much better on this tour, which he attributed to his Android phone. I have to agree that I has definitely changed the way I travel. In retrospect I should have spent the extra $20 and tried the 3G as there was much less open wifi than I expected. Over-all I was very happy with the way it performed.