In July I spent a month backpacking through England and Scotland. Unlike my trip a year and a half ago where I carried a camera and a netbook, this time I travelled with only my Android Nexus One phone running Froyo (2.2). Here are my observations on how that worked out.

Network

As soon as I landed in London I dropped into the first mobile store that I chanced across. Through a foggy jet-lagged haze I discussed my needs and ended up purchasing a one month pay-as-you-go plan from O2 for about $17. This included a sim card, $17 worth of talk time, 300 text messages and 500 megs of GPRS/Edge data. I could have added 3G coverage for another $17 but given where I would be travelling I figured the 3G coverage would be pretty spotty and that I could instead complement it with wifi which is what I'm used to doing here in Canada.

I've been playing around with various software and settings for transcoding video for the Nexus One. The bright, clear 800x480 screen of the Nexus One makes it great for watching videos. In order to have the smallest possible file size and to take advantage of the decoding hardware the video needs to be encoded using the H.264 codec.