I recently read Jason Dunn's "Mobile Journey" about taking a recent vacation with his VELO palmtop as his only computer. This reminded me of a trip I took several months ago, in which I discovered some similar things.

My configuration:

• VELO 1 - 4 meg, WinCE 1.0 (Yes, I have the CE 2 upgrade. I tried it, didn't find it much of an improvement. Plus, I read so many stories about problems with the upgrade that I decided the stock 1.0 was fine for what I needed)
• Tray Date (Developer One)
• Calendar Search (Jimmy Software????)
• Power Toys - especially cascade and mute (Microsoft)
• Solitaire - To pass the time on long flights and train rides (Stock WinCE)

The first thing I learned was that power consumption was going to be a real problem. I use my VELO heavily, but usually only for a few minutes at a time. Since I generally go about a week between charges, I threw in a 16 pack of AA batteries, and assumed I would be fine for the trip. BIG MISTAKE! With the VELO as my only computer, I was using it for hours, not minutes at a time. I would go through a set of alkaline batteries in 2 days, sometimes less if I used the modem. Plus, I found that when using disposable batteries, the VELO would not give me proper low battery warnings. Sometimes it would just shutoff. When I did get a lot battery warning, it would barely finish displaying the dialog box, and then die.

In some cases, it would run, but give strange error messages, or refuse to open a document, claiming it was "corrupted." In the two weeks I used alkaline batteries, I had more resets and lost more data than in the entire previous 8 months I'd owned my VELO. Fortunately, I only lost information I had not saved, the stuff in the storage partition was never corrupted.  I tried to locate a place to buy the power adapter in France, but had no luck. I eventually had my parents order the travel adapter from a place called DataVision. They insisted it was in stock, so I asked that be shipped overnight. When it had not arrived 5 days later, they admitted they did not have one, so I canceled my order, and got one from MicroWarehouse. Once that arrived, my power problems went away, I went back to the NiMH pack, which I recharged every night.

I wanted to be able to use my modem, so I put together a connectivity kit that pretty much allowed me to hook up just about anywhere. It consisted of:

• RJ11 to RJ11 cables (two)
• RJ11 to alligator clips
• Electrical tape
• A small cheap telephone (for testing if a phone line was analog. Better to burn out a $5 telephone than my VELO)
• A pocket knife (Many foreign hotels do not have convenient connections. With a bit of splicing though, I was almost always able to hook up)
• A Black Box LinkUP II. (Allows you to connect to digital phone lines by hooking into the place of a standard handset.)

I was able to put all of this together for under $20. I cheated a bit though, since I found the LinkUP at a hamfest for $1 (They usually sell for $150). It worked out quite well. I was consistently able to get data connections. The area behind the modem got a little warmer than I would have liked in some cases, but I always kept my connection times short (Just enough to POP off my email). I found that in many cases, the long phone numbers to dial internationally would overflow the allowed length for phone numbers. I had to dial the number from a standard telephone manually, then tell the VELO to connect with a fake dialing string of one or two digits.

I had no trouble exchanging data via IR with colleagues using the French version of WinCE 2 (As long as my battery was fully charged). The only anomaly I found was that French Pocket Excel interchanges the comma and the decimal point and sometimes got confused when I sent it documents.

Contacts and text file transfers were no problem. I did encounter a lot of problems when traveling via air with my VELO. European airport security is much more cautious about letting you travel with electronics. In two cases, I was not allowed to bring it onboard an aircraft, even having demonstrated that it worked. If you think domestic airline security can be obnoxious when they don't recognize something you are carrying, the Europeans are 10 times worse.

During the 6 � weeks I was there, I typed several megabytes of text, sent hundreds of emails, and took countless notes. The VELO went pretty much everywhere with me. I kept it in a small fanny pack along with my sunglasses, passport, a map of Paris, misc. receipts, and some money. By the end of the trip, the coating on the corners had worn off notably and there were a few extra scratches on my screen. I was a bit nervous, having no way to backup my data for over a month. Were I to do it again, I'd probably try to get a flash card to keep important stuff on. I also wish the calendar handled scheduling events across time zones.

Overall, I think I made the right choice. I did not have to worry about a laptop being broken or stolen the entire time I was there. I was able to do the work I needed to do, and kept the amount of paper I had to carry around to a minimum. Perhaps the best indication is that on my next trip (for only 2 weeks this time) I again took only my VELO, leaving the laptop at home.