Mr Fry’s gadget bag

I always thought that Quentin and I must be the most chronic cases of travelling geeks (in terms of the amount of kit we take with us) in the western world. But I was wrong. We are mere amateurs, nay boulevardiers, compared with Mr Stephen Fry. Here is the list of what he has just unpacked in his New York hotel room.

7 x Mini USB cables: 2 of them are the new Micro type that Blackberry has switched to for the Storm only, the rest are standard.

4 x iPod/iPhone chargers: I seem to use one iPhone exclusively for mad hacking, jailbreaking and frigging about with, another as a pedometer, another for music, another as a – guess what ? – phone. I know I’m putting my botty on the line by confessing to jailbreakage and hackery, but I think Apple (while each update brings a new weapon in their war against Pwnage and SIM-card skulduggery) are man enough to take it.

3 x Hard drives: Took the hasty decision to come to America (I shan’t be back in Britain till late January) with just one computer, one of the new MacBooks. It doesn’t have Firewire. Duh? Maddening, since my favourite hard drive is Firewire only. But at least the MacBook allows a proper connection, unlike the underpowered USB of the original version of the scrumptious MacBook Air. You know that feeling when you have a whole lump of data on one device or peripheral and you want to get it on another and you suddenly realise you can’t? ‘Okay, so I upload it onto a compact flash card. No onto an SD card. Hell where’s my card reader? Right. I email myself the file…’ etc., etc. That happens to me a lot.

1 Snowball USB Microphone: just in case I have the sudden yen to record a podgram. You never know.

6 x SIM cards: Orange, Vodafone, 2 x O2, T-Mobile, AT&T. My UK mobile number is Orange, that’s my regular number, but one needs to swap and shuffle and use other networks in order properly to play. I know. I’m weird. I’ve long accepted it. But weird is just another way of spelling “wired”. I drew weird in another way and got wired.

1 x Blackberry Bold
1 x Blackberry Storm
1 x HTC G1 Android ‘Googlephone’
1 x Pocketsurfer
n x iPhones (too many, you’d only laugh or snort with derision if I told you the exact number)

Assorted CDs

Assorted Manuals and Quickstart Guides.

Mind you, he probably travels by private jet. Try getting that pile of stuff past a RyanAir check-in.