I’m actually about to head out on another extended trip (3 weeks in Taiwan, 2 weeks in Japan), but I thought I’d take a few minutes to write up how the iPad was on my first long trip (to Australia, Fiji) while it’s still somewhat fresh.

It was definitely convenient on the long flights to and from Sydney (about 14 hours each way) and I barely broke out my laptop on both those flights – while the 16GB is fine for most uses, when you’re putting on HD movies that are 4-8GB in size… well, there was definitely some laptop swapping (definitely cursing iTunes and wishing the iPad had some way to read external storage directly). As an aside, I highly recommend MKVtools, which will do intelligent container shifting for many devices. For the iPad, you usually won’t need to re-encode the x264 video track, just the audio (usually AC3 or DTS) into AAC.  It’s a one-click operation for the iPad, and is much faster than transcoding (taking about 10 minutes instead of 10 hours for a movie). It’s free to use one-by-one, but totally worth the $5 to unlock queueing of encodes.

I flew economy on VAustralia, which while not exactly cramped, was certainly more comfortable with the iPad than a laptop open.  In economy, the seats also had USB power, which was also convenient, although if you’re fully charged up, actually unnecessary.

I ended up carrying my iPad just about everywhere, as I picked up a free data SIM (see my previous mobile data writeup) and had a perfectly sized bag. (only $20, and with just the right amount of extra pockets, super recommended.) The nice thing is that unlike my trusty Chrome bag when loaded with my Macbook, there wasn’t really a moment where I felt dragged down, even going up and down Sydney’s biggest hills. (I know, right? Who knew? Sydney is super hilly!)

While I had my laptop nearby most of the time, I decided to head to Fiji with just my iPad to see how well that would work out.  While that wasn’t too bad, it was mostly due to my being mostly disconnected (there was very little wifi and I barely got mobile data working at about $2/MB with a Vodafone Fiji SIM). I found that there were a couple times where I wanted USB charging and transfers, mostly for my camera, but also when I rented a car and it had an SD slot in the stereo. (!)  The iPad did, however work with the prepaid internet access at the airport despite the system’s warning that browser popups needed to be supported.

It was an interesting experiment, but even not doing any work, it seems that the iPad isn’t quite there yet as the only thing you carry traveling.  Not if you plan on taking photos or want to move any files around.

So that’s it for my iPad report.  The Toshiba AC100 is out in Japan, Taiwan, and in Europe, so that’ll probably be the next report (maybe, unless Apple releases a dead sexy 11″ Macbook Air, or I’m magically swayed by the Vaio X; I’ve written at length, however, about why I’m particularly interested in smartbooks, even over other ultraportable options).