iTravel

Now that the Florida adventure is over — my first flight with the iPhone and kid — there’s some things I’ll do differently next time:

1) Bring my old school 20 GB iPod with me for listening to purely audio stuff, like the audio version of Carl Hiaasen’s Nature Girl that I’m still not finished with. There’s no reason to run down the iPhone battery when I need it to check e-mail and SMS on layovers and want the iPhone to be good to go for showing They Might Be Giants’ kid music videos to the kid to take the edge off when he gets a little frantic after being cooped up in an airplane seat as long as he was.

2) Bring the right charging plug. I somehow ended up with an old Firewire plug-in cube, which was totally useless for recharging in the airport.

3) Invest in some portable iPhone speakers (with a horizontal display of the iPhone) for the kid to watch his TMBG videos, Sesame Street video podcasts and (next time) Looney Tunes cartoons. The iPhone external speaker just can’t compete with airplane noise and putting earphones on a 13 month old kid is too foolish to contemplate, especially if I want the earphones back in working order.

4) Invest in a back-up battery, just in case.

Overall, though, the iPhone was a great asset, letting me keep up with work e-mails (there’s a big pending arrest I’ve been covering for two months, waiting for it to go public, and didn’t want to miss it if it happened while I was in Florida) even as I was playing with James in the Gulf of Mexico outside Bradenton. It didn’t do anything my trio of Treos couldn’t do, but it did it all so much better and more elegantly that it was really a pleasure to use in comparison. Taking pictures and checking e-mail on the beach while chasing a kid down the shore would have been a good recipe for losing the phone or the kid with my Treo, but was totally natural with the iPhone.

It was amusing to see that, when we took off from Ontario, literally half of the plane seemed to be using iPhones, but the further east we went, the more exotic it seemed to my fellow passengers. I guess Californians really are trendy when it comes to their toys.

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