Up until today, I’ve always been indifferent about the inclusion of a rear-facing camera on MIDs and UMPCs. Which ones had it and which ones didn’t was never a concern to me. If I want to take a picture, I used to think, I’ll just use a regular camera or a smartphone. If I want to share those photos, I’ll do it later by transferring them from my camera’s memory card to a computer or emailing them from my phone to a sharing site like Flickr or even directly to a blog.

But today, on my first day of the MID Moves tour, I am sitting at a cafe near the entrance of Magic Mountain wishing the OQO Model 2+ I’m typing this on had a camera. And not even a very good one. Just *something* that would allow me to take a quick picture and add it to this post.

The Model 2+ doesn’t have a memory card slot so I can’t insert the microSD card from the Xperia or the xD card from my husband’s casual-use Olympus point-and-shoot. And since I didn’t expect my Xperia’s email functions (don’t ask me how my last post got through, as there’s no record of it in my “sent” folder and I had been trying to send it since I got here two hours ago) or my iPhone’s 3G capabilities to give out on me at the same time today, I didn’t have the foresight to bring a memory card reader, let alone the adapter my microSD card would need to go into it. Bluetooth file transfers aren’t working either.

So that’s why I’m thumbing out my frustrations in a photo-less post. Expect more micro blogging and text-only posts than anything else today. *sigh* Not a good day so far.

• Goodbye smartphone, hello BenQ S6 MID
• New UMPC. New HSDPA contract. New problem.
• New OrigamiProject Contest