Wireless Internet Wherever You Are

To a frequent traveller like myself, portable wifi sounded like a dream come true.

Hire a mobile wifi device, take it with you. Be online wherever you are. Luxury hotels, business hotels, vacation rentals, wherever.*

So when Fonmigo (now TEP) asked me to test out their product, I jumped at the chance.

FonMigo (Now TEP) – An Independent Review

THE IDEA

If you’re new to the concept (as I was), here’s how it works. A small, smooth device about half the size of an old mobile phone arrives by post. You charge it up as you do a mobile phone, switch it on, then log in to the wifi connection it produces using the username and password supplied.

Easy peasy.

You hire a certain amount of data (which you can top up later if needs be) and away you go. At the end of your trip, you pop it back into the envelope provided and send it back to Fonmigo (now TEP.)

That’s the idea – and it’s a dreamy one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to get online – if only for a short time – while abroad, without having to pay extortionate prices or roam around carrying my laptop through the rain.

THE REALITY

Just like mobile phones, these devices struggle in certain situations. Any time you’re moving – working on a train or a coach, for example – the signal dies.

Also, any time you head away from the major cities you’re left with internet Russian roulette. Widespread areas of the Costa Brava region in Spain, most of south Wales and even a number of spots in London had no signal at all.

The TEP devices also don’t like sharing. Advertised as allowing up to four people to connect to a single device at any one time, after testing in two countries and umpteen configurations, I only managed to do this once – for about 20 minutes. Usually, the first to log on is the only one able to get online.

Finally, there’s the issue of getting hold of and returning the mifi (as the cool kids are calling it these days.)

As I say, I tested this out four times. On two occasions, the device arrived a day late (leaving me without a roaming facility and paying for two days of hotel internet access.) On one occasion, I received an email from TEP to say that the device had not been received (a situation that would normally result in a fine.) On the 4^th occasion, in Spain rather than the UK, there were no delivery problems.

Having spoken to FonMigo (now TEP), they assure me that these glitches have been resolved and wish to remind me that I used the devices during their testing phase.

I explained that, as ever, I’d have to give my honest opinion on how things did or didn’t work. They replied to say they wanted me to publish my experiences now rather than re-test.

THE CONCLUSION

So…In conclusion. Great idea, didn’t quite work out when I tested it. May be better now.

TEP – A Portable Wifi Device first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

It’s the old travel photography dilemma: digital SLR or compact point and shoot. You want the best pictures (and that means SLR plus lenses and other paraphernalia as above,) yet you also don’t want to

a)      Lug around all that extra weight

b)      Mark yourself out as a rich, flashy tourist and virtually encourage locals to rob you

c)       Spend so much money to begin with

d)      Lose that money when the bulkiness of the camera body and lenses throws you off balance in a steep icy war tunnel and you slide for metres sustaining the odd injury but narrowly avoiding much worse. Not that I’m speaking from personal experience, of course.

But you do want those great pictures. Sigh…

Well, Sony think they’ve found the holy grail with their flagship SONY NEX5, the smallest and lightest camera with interchangeable lenses to date. They asked me to give it a trial run and here’s what I thought…

Independent Review of the SONY NEX5

Lightweight

Well, we hit it off straight away. The Sony NEX 5 is small and it is light and after a day wandering around the city, my usually aching shoulder felt as carefree as ever. I understand SONY describe it as a camera you can put in your pocket. This is something of a stretch, unless you happen to be wearing a kangaroo costume, but it certainly fits into my handbag. Huge points for this.

Controls

The menu and setup stages are intuitive and easy to use (plus, I have a soft spot for the clean, sweet noise it makes as you scroll through options and take a photo.) As a tiny point, I prefer buttons to dials on a camera: once you know what you’re doing, you can change settings much faster as you don’t need to look at the screen.

Sony NEX5: Making it easier to take travel photos

Manual Settings & Gadgets

The Sony NEX5 gives you all the manual control you could want. The DMF (where the camera autofocuses the first part and then you fine-tune the rest) is a great idea for saving time.

Detachable flash…I’m not entirely sure why they’ve done this. Presumably on bright sunny days, the thinking went, you leave the flash at home to cut down on weight. However, if you’re travelling for more than a day or suddenly realise you need a shot of canned sunshine then this isn’t going to work.

SONY NEX5 - Small Enough to Fit in a Kayak

Cool SONY NEX5 Features

Video and panoramic shooting – I’ll explain more about those in later posts. (Update! Sony NEX5 Video Tips & Review Now Here)

The shooting tips will be hugely helpful if this is your first journey out of the safe “auto” mode – and the explanations given for aperture and what’s more commonly labelled Tv are some of the clearest I’ve ever seen.

SONY NEX5: Copes well with low light

Drawbacks

No viewfinder

Image composition takes place on a screen, not through a viewfinder. Indoors, or perhaps in Britain and other grey and sludgy climates, this isn’t a problem. In snow, ice and sunshine, it definitely is. The NEX-5 has plenty of great features – but they fade away if sunlight blocks the view of what you’re taking a picture of.

Finding Lenses

The interchangeable lenses are incredibly hard to find! By the end of this trial, I honestly was ready to retire my old SLR and give my back and shoulders a break by switching to the SONY NEX5. And maybe someday I will. But until I can find a zoom lens to go with it, I’m chained to my old setup. Let’s hope that changes in the future.

SONY NEX5: Copes well with flying fish in Seattle's Pike Place Market

So, does the SONY NEX-5 solve the travel photography dilemma and should you buy one?

Depends on who you are. The SONY NEX5 is a fantastic choice if you’re stepping out of the point and shoot and auto world for the first time and you travel a lot. Its lightness, image quality and helpful layout make it an absolute pleasure to use.

If you’re a more serious travel photographer, it doesn’t quite do everything you need. Weigh up (ho, ho) the limitations against reducing the strain on your back.

SONY NEX5: Freeing you to explore more

The SONY NEX-5 Camera: The Travel Photography Dilemma Solved? first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

If you’ve never heard of it and hate cyber entities (except for this wonderful blog, of course), then amuse yourself instead with photographs from intoxicating Seville, articles about the Okavango Delta or read about the extremely authoritative highlights of Japan.

What is TBEX?

TBEX stands for Travel Blog Exchange and it started as an online community for travel bloggers under the guidance of the very motivated Kim Mance, Debbie Dubrow and Maren Hogan.

TBEX then became a bestselling conference slash meet-up slash explore a new city.

As I type this out, I’m in sunny Copenhagen (well, alright, there’s not much sun but it is dry) about to head out and take part in my first TBEX conference.

TBEX Europe

It’s the first of its kind in Europe and it’s called, you guessed it, TBEX Europe. There’s only myself and another few hundred bloggers taking part.

The itinerary looks exciting, a mix of work (SEO, narrative and non-narrative travel writing, marketing and so on) and more work, albeit the kind that friends never believe is work (canal cruises, world-class breweries, exploring the heritage of Hans Christian Andersen and thoroughly investigating the excellent word smørrebrød.)

Get Involved with TBEX (for free)

So, if you have a travel blog and you want to get involved in TBEX then sign up here.

If you have no interest at all in the online travel industry, then go drool at some pictures of chocolate here.

And if you have a sneaky interest in this behind the scenes stuff, you can follow me on twitter at @insidethetravellab or @abigailking, follow the whole conversation on the #TBEX hashtag, catch some early photos of Copenhagen on Inside the Travel Lab’s Facebook Page or…just chill and wait for in-depth, photo-rich articles to come to a blog near you soon!

Right, I’m off to explore Copenhagen, to look for…something unusual and to make sure that I do thoroughly investigate that smørrebrød.

What is TBEX? first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

I’m playing with experimenting with technology today at Inside the Travel Lab. So here’s a cool photo from the island of Miya Jima (Shrine Island) in Japan to keep you entertained while I meddle with connections to Inside the Travel Lab’s Facebook Page.

Back soon…

A Cool Photo – Miya Jima first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

For those of you considering making the same move – read on.

First off, why bother?

I changed because I wanted more control over how my blog looked and what I could do with it. Also, as I researched technical tips and tricks online I found a lot more help available for wordpress than blogger.

Was it hard?

Well, yes and no. It wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to believe. WordPress now makes it pretty easy to import all your posts and pictures from blogger in a few simple clicks.

However, the main problem with the switch involves keeping all your links and hard fought for search engine status (the post name changes with wordpress – and I haven’t been able to override it manually to the old post titles.) Although I read about various plugins (programs you can download to help run your wordpress blog) that were supposed to overcome this problem – I couldn’t get any of them to work properly.

Luckily, most people had linked to my homepage, which didn’t change. Unfortunately I had to go back through my blog and reformat all the broken links that linked to my own posts. The broken linkchecker plugin helped here – but it was still tedious.

I also found lots of blogs that told me that I’d have to reload all of my images – although I didn’t need to in the end.

The other snag is subscriptions – if you already use feedburner then you won’t run into many problems with this. If you don’t, then you will have to tell your subscribers that their subscription address is about to change and that they need to change it as well. Not everyone can be bothered to do this, so you may well lose some subscribers…

Sounds dull. Can’t I get someone else to do it for me?

Absolutely – there are loads of people offering to move you across for a fee. I did it myself (because I’m like that!) so I can’t vouch for their services but the following people were friendly and approachable when I looked into it:

Rent-a-geek Dream Website Academy

THE DIY OPTION

The first hurdle to cause confusion is that wordpress.com and wordpress.org are very different entities despite having similar names. WordPress.com is a free way of getting a blog or a website and I’d recommend signing up and having a play around with that first to see if you like the way it works. However, it’s free for a reason as you’re fairly limited in terms of how much you can modify your blog.

That’s when you move onto wordpress.org. For this, you MUST

a)      Pay for your own domain name (eg the domain name for Inside the Travel Lab is www.insidethetravellab.com)

b)      Pay someone to host your site (I use bluehost)

Step by Step Instructions

What you need to do will depend on where you start (own domain name or not) and how much you care about preserving your old work.

I found this guide on How to Move From Blogger to WordPress by JD to be incredibly helpful, with a few tips from Andy Didyk as well. Both give the kind of ‘bare bones’ approach that I love, but if you’re after more structure then try Heather’s post on project planning for your move.

So am I all settled in?

Not yet. I’ve still got to put my pictures on the walls and work out where the local takeaways are. But it’s already starting to feel like home.

Any other tips, tricks or questions?

Drop them in the comments below. And good luck!

Moving from Blogger to WordPress first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

Glitches first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...