By far, the most useful device I brought on my trip this time has been the Nintendo DS. Of course, it has been modified so I can do more than play games on it. The most basic thing is text files. For example, I can copy a timetable of a train and reference that while I’m traveling. I tried copying in an entire chapter of a travel guide (converted to JPEG) and then using ComicBookDS to view, but that was not as successful due to the limited RAM in the Nintendo DS. I did use it a few times to reference some maps though. It is nice to use your finger (on the touch screen) to scroll around a map.
Of course the best thing about the DS while traveling are the games. I picked out about 70-80 games to put on my 8GB Micro SD card. In addition, some emulators work quite well, such as NES and SNES. In America, I don’t have much of a chance to play these games since I’m usually at home and cannot play when I’m driving a car. But when I’m traveling abroad, it is perfect for all the hours in buses, subways, and trains. Plus the battery life on mine is about 8 hours. Much better than my laptop, which is maybe 1 hour currently. To charge the battery, I have a USB cable I plug into my PC, so I don’t have to worry about any additional adapters.
This time I also bought a new music player: Sansa e200R series with 4GB. This has been modified too with Rockbox software. Now I have a flashlight, calendar, and calculator among other things. The latest update includes time-stretching so you can listen to talking (like radio programs or audio books) up to 2.5x speed without changing the pitch. Well, you can change the pitch independently too which is interesting.
There’s one more thing I bought along: a 1TB 3.5” hard drive. I brought along a copy of everything from my home PC in case I got a job and have to stay long term. Once I arrived in China I bought an enclosure for the drive. It does come in handy sometimes when I need to get some rarely used items or for backing up photos. However, it is so heavy to carry this big drive, the enclosure, the power supply, and all the cables. If I’m going to travel this much again, I’ll stick with a 2.5”.