The Nino on Holiday
Tim Richardson
(Updated: 09 Jul 1999)
Recently I took my Nino with me on a trip to New York, Chicago and London. The Nino proved to be a very useful travel companion. Perhaps some of my uses of it will demonstrate what you can do with a modern PDA (Personal Digital Assistant).
I used it for maps, for downloaded city-guides, for directions, and for reading electronic books. All this cost me not a cent (above the Nino, of course!).
My Nino configuration
I have a 4MB Nino with an 8MB Compact Flash Card. Important Nino freeware: HTML view. See Mike's Palm-Sized PC page for the software mentioned on this page.
Pocket Street Maps
I installed onto my Nino Pocket Streets -- free from Microsoft on the Nino CD Rom.
I also installed the maps of New York and Chicago.
Pocket Streets is excellent. Most useful is the search feature: say you want to find the "Carlton Hotel". Just go to the Find menu, choose Places and write "Carlton". Up comes "The Carlton Hotel". Click, and you are taken there on the map. The database is very good; many restaurants and cinemas are there, but not everything. Looking for the "Screening Room" fails to find a match. In this case, just enter the address. For instance, say you are looking for 19 West 31st St. Enter "19 West 31" into the Find Address dialog box, and ZAP, the maps locks right in.
However, I found it difficult to use the map to find subway entry points.
Fodor Web City Mini-Guides
At www.fodors.com you can create HTML city-guides. These have basic arrival information, good reviews of accommodation and eating options, getting around tips and so on. You use a form to specify what information you want. I made a guide for each of three cities I was visiting, and downloaded these guides onto my Nino.
Of course, I had to have an HTML reader on the Nino before this was useful. I use "HTML View", which is freeware.
To download the guides, first I created them by visiting the Fodors site with Netscape Communicator 4. Then, I saved the guide as a file. To make sure all the graphics were saved, I edited the page using Netscape Composer, and saved from Composer. This automatically saves all images. I dragged these files onto my storage card, into a London folder inside "My Documents".
This was very useful, particularly for restaurant reviews by price range.
Arrival Information
I hadn't been to New York before, and I wanted to make sure the cabbie wasn't going to give me the run-around.
Before I left home, I visited www.mapquest.com, and generated directions from JFK airport to my hotel. This produces both driving instructions, allowing me to say something impressive like "Take the Van Wyck onto the Long Island Expressway", and also a couple of graphics, which were not much use. Naturally, I downloaded this onto the Nino, for use with HTML View.
In the end, I needn't have worried. There is a fixed fare from JFK to Manhattan destinations, and I found New York cabbies to be polite, good drivers, with a more than adequate command of English, and driving clean cabs. New York traffic and cabs are pretty mild after Jakarta or Shanghai.
Free Books
Ever since I owned my OmniGo, I had hoped to access the vast library of free books at Project Gutenberg via my PDA. But the OmniGo only supported a proprietary book format, and the battery life was hopeless.
But with the Nino, this dream is realised.
Mike's Palm-Sized PC page takes you to free software that easily converts Gutenberg text files into HTML files; it is called "Make Doc".
So a few clicks later, I had "Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" in HTML and sitting on my storage card.
Reading tip: HTML View has a Jump Scroll option under the View menu. Turn this on, and each click of the down button moves one screen-full. Thanks to the design of the Nino with the side-mounted buttons, it can be held and scrolled in one hand. Thus you could find me sipping a coffee down near Washington Square with the Nino in my hand under the table (so has not to look like a complete dweeb), scrolling through the history of the Mississippi scheme and the South Sea bubble. This was to prove useful in London, when after a night's clubbing we were heading home on the Tube, and one of my companions, occupied in admiration of the visual effect of fluorescent tubes in a tiled tunnel (difficult to appreciate in a normal state of mind) was approached by a man asking her if she was interested in a financing a "scheme of adventure, which must remain a secret", which was remarkably similar to one of the more blatant con-jobs of the South Sea bubble era. We were both still a bit floaty, but recognising the echo of the 18th century, I laughed at him and said we hadn't heard that one for a while, which took the wind out of his sails.