It’s been pretty good for travelling, quite handy for backing up pics on the road and I can quite happily spend hours on it playing inane games. Current favourites include Temple Run and F.Godmom from those DOS days gone by.

Yes, it is like a bigger iPhone minus the phone component, but it’s much nicer to read content on a bigger screen. I find myself preferring to catch up on news using Flipboard and Google Currents than browsing from my desktop.

The downside of the thing is that it prevents me from going to bed. Well, technically it gets me in bed sooner, reading and browsing, but I’m far less inclined to fall asleep. It’s amazing how many hours it so effortlessly sucks up. Other than that, the iPad is pretty muy bien.

I still have my bulky, old Nintendo Gameboy and it still works! The only game I really ever played on it was Tetris. Unfortunately, the iOS Tetris doesn’t have the classic theme tune!! It’d be cool if had a Gameboy classic mode emulating the original.

The joys of being a 90's kid

Some people are really missing out. :-p

When planning a trip, it’s always handy to have all your flight details and confirmations at hand. To keep organised, I recommend WorldMate. It’s free and the cool thing is that you can just forward your confirmations and booking details to either your unique WorldMate email address or the generic WorldMate email address (having linked your email address with it) and it’ll pretty much set up your trip itinerary for you. You can also manually tweak your itineraries for things like meetings or visits to museums and whatnot.

If you really want to travel light (no such thing for photographers hauling kgs of kit), you could leave your Lonely Planet and Rough Guide at home and replace it with TripWolf. Just select the city or country that you’ll be travelling to and download the guide before departure. Since TripWolf is based on integration of info from the Marco Polo guides and user generated info, it’s pretty much a constant work in progress so you should have the latest info everytime you update it. Most of the guides are free to download within the TripWolf app, but there are some places for which you can download a premium guide for a price, I think it’s something like £4/5. I assume it has more detailed info than the basic guide.

There’s nothing quite like immersing yourself in the local culture by learning the local lingo. To save on having to bring a separate phrasebook, I recommend Lingopal. Unlike the traditional paperbacked phrasebooks, it speaks to you! You can download individual language apps, a few are free and most are paid (only 59p each), there’s also a dedicated app to help you flirt in all their different languages as well as the complete bumper pack of all the phrases (travel, essentials, flirts, insults etc) in 44 languages. It has some pretty humerous phrases including Sophie’s favorite “Oj! Jag tappade glassen… Kan du slicka upp den?” and some of their insults are quite priceless like, my favourite, “Om jag skulle vilja höra från ett ashål hade jag släppt mig”.

See here for more info.

It was surprisingly easy to set up, all I did was install the software on my computer and then opened up the app on my iPhone, selected my computer which it automatically detected and voila, all done. So now I can use my computer with ease while I’m on the exercise bike! How’s that for multitasking?

There are some way cool apps you can download for it. My favourite so far is probably Urbanspoon with its scope feature giving that augmented reality feel to it. There’s also What Knot to Do by Columbia, the outdoors clothing people with a guide on knots! Language Translator is pretty good too and the auto detect language tool works fairly well when I tested it with what few languages I know.

I do miss real buttons though. The on screen keyboard is fine, but takes a little getting used to it. Not sure how well it’d work for those with fat fingers.