I went on holiday recently, travelling around Spain. You know holidays - getting away from it all, taking it all in. Not being dragged down by the chains of every day life, such as mobile phones and tabs and what-not?

Well, no actually, I went fully geared up. My trip to Spain was going to involve around 20 hours each way on a plane (Singapore Airlines - if you are going economy, it is the best option) so I needed as much distraction as possible for the flights alone, but generally I wanted to be connected.

This was seen as a rather dubious approach to a vacation by my partner. Though by the end of it she was won over completely. Not least of all that time where we got trapped in a stairwell trying to leave our rental apartment for the airport. The n810 tab found a wifi connection and I was able to Skype the rental agency to get us out - we made the flight

So the first task of getting there was to get a local SIM for 3G. That was pretty easy except for exceeding my Spanish ability quite dramatically. The Vodafone person seemed to enjoy working out what I was going on about anyway.

So with local 3G I am online. My 8Gb SD card packed with movies and shows and music. The internal card filled with ebooks and a Spanish-English dictionary.

I have a female - female adapter so that I can upload my photos to a server as I go, using microSD everywhere now with adapters.

A mini-hub and an external wifi card to do "penetration testing". Also a pocket AP for those places where they only have a wired internet connection.

So I was all set.

Except for one thing. Travelling around, once in a while you need to just lay up. Take a night off from the sights and sounds and just chill. So I had a tab full of movies, and two of us, and a TV.

And no way to play the movies on the TV from the tab. I toyed around with playing the movies from my camera, as I had brought along the AV cables, but no dice... I would need to run a conversion I think - I didn't get to the bottom of it.

So has anyone explored the possibility of using a USB to TV out from a Nokia tab? I don't think it is feasible - but it would be cool to have the tab as a media centre while on the go, as well as everything else.

Multimedia portable hard drives are pretty good. In Singapore on the return trip I found a media player that took a USB mass storage device as input, and had all the necessary stuff in it to play any movies on the usb device out to a TV. It wasn't much smaller than a multi-media hard drive, but I reckon it would get included in my travel kit next time....