Introduction

As Robin and I prepared for a recent trip to the Mid-East, we decided to "travel light." We packed just enough clothes to get by, plus a gadget bag filled with a Palm handheld PDA, a small video camera, 30 blank mini-dv tapes, a digital still camera, and two gigabytes worth of Compact-Flash cardsplus an assortment of adapters and battery chargers. Oh yeah, and a Garmin GPS. We decided to leave the laptop at home (the "travel light" thing). After all, we had a Wi-Fi PDA with us, Internet cafes are everywhere, and many of the hotels we'd be staying in would surely provide computers and connections for their guests.

This "travel light" concept seemed to be working great the first couple of days. In New York, as we waited for our flight to Egypt, I used my Wi-Fienabled Palm to send a short email to the .Mac Group Page we created just for the trip. It was awkward typing on the teeny little keyboard, but it was fun being so mobile and "light." "Road Warriors must sometimes be willing to endure hardships like this," I said as I retyped the same sentence five times and watched the battery drain on the Palm Tungsten C handheld device.

A couple of days later in Alexandria, using my PDA, I detected an open Wi-Fi network on the balcony of our room overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Cool. I sent a short update to our .Mac Group Page (too tired to deal with typing a long message on a teeny little keyboard, or trying to get the portable, folding, infrared keyboard to work). By now, the PDA needed charging. I used an adapter to plug the PDA charger/cradle into the wall plug. Oopsforgot to check the voltage on the back of the charger before we left; this was the only electronic device in our pack that needed a transformer. The PDA is OK, but the charger is toast. OK, no problemPlan Buse PCs in Internet cafes and hotels.

This Alexandrian cafe had water pipes, but no Wi-Fi.

Plan B worked, but not as well as traveling with our own laptop. Ooh, how easy and fun it would've been to download and organize my photos every night while relaxing in the hotel room, instead of having a thousand hi-res photos to download and organize after I got home. And how convenient it would have been to write updates for the .Mac Group Page while lounging in bed, then send them whenever a connection was available. And, as you may know, using Windows on a hotel's PC is not the elegant experience that we Mac users expect from a computer.

As for Internet cafes, they were more scarce in Egypt and Jordan than in places like Pokhara, Nepal, and our daily schedule was so packed with adventures and discoveries, we just didn't have enough free time available to find them. I wondered, could someone back home FedEx my laptop to me? Is there an Apple Store in Luxor? Do they take American Express? No, no, and yes.

The next time we "travel light," it'll be because I've replaced most of those heavy clothes items with a Mac laptop (and maybe a transformer). But I don't expect to have any trouble next time because we just wrote this book and it contains all the information needed for successful mobile computing, plus lots of tips that'll make even new laptop users feel like seasoned Road Warriors.

This book was written for laptops with Mac OS X Tiger installed, but a great deal of the information also works just fine for Mac laptops that use older versions of Mac OS X (Jaguar and Panther).

Gotta run! My new EVDO card arrived!