During our European tour, electronic stuff compised a netbook, which lived in one front pannier, and a bag with chargers, backup batteries, cables, and stuff, that lived in the other front pannier. Each of these bundles weighed about three pounds. (We'll check that when we get near a scale) EDIT: checked the weights today (Dec 1) and last years computer related stuff was about 6 lbs, this year it is only 3.  To this we could add the weight of USB bike lights, dynamo and regulator, cell phone, etc. - depending on what you want to call "electronics". No matter how you define it, for us, and for a lot of cyclists, electronics is a heavy topic!   Weight was not the end of the story when it came to this stuff. Say at a rest stop, digging the equipment out of the bags which they shared with food, was a bit of a chore. The netbook too took a while to boot up, so access was not totally swift  

Clearly lighter weight, quicker booting, faster grabbing stuff could be an advantage. Dodie summarized this by the test - can it all fit in the handlebar bag (with room for snacks, wallet, and other typical critical stuff too)?   This test rules out ten inch tablets right away, since the bag is nine inches wide. And four to five inch smartphones are out, because they are just too small to manage photos. So that leaves us with seven to eight inch tablets.   In the seven to eight inch tablet category, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 jumped out, especially since this was before the introduction of the iPad Mini. It had a little edge in size over the seven inch tablets, and still fit the handlebar bar bag really easily.  

Even though it  is possible for some equipment to be better suited than other choices, ultimately lunch is seldom totally free. So although the Galaxy Tab is light and small, it also lacks a few things as it comes out of the box. These things include any USB ports, any SD card reader, any high capacity hard drive or storage, any physical keyboard, and of course any mouse, though of course many would argue that the user automatically comes with up to ten perfectly good fingers.   Plugging these gaps adds cost and also weight, and none of the fixes turns out to be nearly as good as the old fashioned ones built  in to every laptop or netbook.  

The other old fashioned thing found in most netbooks is Windows (in some version less than 8!), and the trusted software that runs on Windows. Attractive as tens of thousands of Apps may sound, you can sure do a lot with Windows Explorer, Word, and their friends.

  At first the deal breaker on any tablet seemed to be the fact that on the Crazyguy site, it is impossible to upload multiple photos (at once) with any touch screen device. It turned out that the workaround of sending photos in by email works fairly well, though it is a bit of a pain. The key to this is that makers of email web sites (like Gmail) seem better able to handle multiple attachments than the maker of Crazyguy (sorry Neil). The first group, to be fair, has million (or billion) dollar budgets, while the second group (err, guy), has thousand dollar budgets. That reminds me - it is time to send in a few more dollars!  

I will soon post a review (in Reviews) of the whole darn hardware/software deal involved with a tablet vs a netbook. When the review is done, there will be a link visible here as well. Just a preview, though: The actual typical process of taking photos with a camera and ultimately getting them stored, sized, selected, captioned, and available on Crazyguy involves quite a bit of hardware and software. The steps are pretty involved, when you break them down, and equipment that fights you or is too small for the task better have something else pretty good going for it, to keep its spot on the bike. The Review will look at the struggle in detail.   Watch this space too, for photos and description of the specialized tablet junque that is getting ready to hitchhike on our ride down the coast, for a look at the netbook junque now facing unemployment, and for a look at the general electronic/electrical junque junque that seems to come on any ride notwithstanding,

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