I’m off to Beijing soon… what should I take?

Once this month’s warm-up event in Beijing is tidied away some of the most exciting sport you’ll see will be coming to you from Beijing… the Paralympic element of the 29th Olimpiad.  Your intrepid reporter will be with Team GB’s medal-winning wheelchair basketball team reporting live – I’ll also try to give you the low-down on  the other sports going on.

However, right now the question is what mobile tech should I take to use and test?  On the list so far:

• Truphone and Rebtel for cheap international calling
• A local China Mobile SIM possibly with some mobile data
• A SIMable chip so I can swap SIMs into any phones I like
• iPhone for music and a simple Mandarin language course
• Some offline maps with Olympic venue POI such as Garmin’s
• An N82 for pictures
• Several Proporta backup batteries
• A netbook for mobile blogging (which one?)
• The Macbook Air for proper computing
• A decent gadget bag – something that doesn’t scream ‘laptop’!
• Some high quality headphones for the flights – perhaps Entymotics?

Any other recommendations / options?  Have you been to China and what was useful / rubbish?

Mobile tech turns Glastonbury green

News just in from the guys at Moblog about their mobile blogging platform which is driving a great initiative by Greenpeace, Oxfam and Water Aid intended to make sure Glastonbury farm (yes, it’s a real farm with real cows and stuff) is back in a working state as soon as possible: the Leave No Trace campaign is here with a mobile site here.

The cleverness about this campaign is the way they’re using mobile technology:

“Bloggers from the three organisations will be roaming the festival, taking pictures and video clips and posting them to  http://leavenotrace.org.uk, which is also available as a mobile website, http://m.leavenotrace.org.uk for easy access on-site. Because these posts will also be marked on a Google map, we’ll be showing where the best examples of green living are – whether it’s solar-powered showers, sculpture made from recycled materials or water-saving systems – as well as highlighting the nooks and crannies of the festival which might otherwise be missed. Plus everyone on the farm can contribute images and video can be posted to the site by sending an SMS or MMS with the keyword TIDY at the start to 07786 201 241″

The bloggers will also be using another of our favourite mobile technologies Spinvox to post to the site during the festival meaning they’ll be producing the entire site’s content from an entirely mobile platform.

Excellent stuff, but also both technologies available to everyone to use right now… It’s incredible to see how quickly mobile blogging technology is maturing.