We’re rolling some serious electronics gear in the R8 for the Gumball:

• iPhone 3G: It pained me to join the iPhone subculture but it is frankly the most capable phone/camera/internet device around that will allow me to upload pictures and blog from the road in both the US and China. Installed apps:

• Pandora - custom internet radio - my fav app by far.
• Dynolicious - very cool accelerometer to measure tops speeds, braking and G-force in the car. I’ll be interested to see how well this works.
• I tried the WordPress app but could never get it working - too buggy. I’m posting text and pictures to the blog from the road via email and the Postie Wordpress plugin (rocks).

• Thinkpad T61 w/ Verizon Broadband: The 9-cell battery gives me about 8 hrs of charge. The laptop has the webcam (for the live feed to Justin.tv) and the GPS telemetry recorder plugged into it. It will also be our mapping system while we’re in China, should we need it.
• Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000: Nice camera that mounts easily in the car and has a built-in mic. Does the job.
• Deluo 36-031-12 Bluetooth DataLogger GPS: This bad boy sits on the dash and records all of our speed and telemetry data while pumping it (via bluetooth) back into the Thinkpad. I’m going to try uploading the data overlaid on a map each night to this site.
• 4-way 12V splitter + 160W Inverter: Just in case we need to blend up a daiquiri or heat up a burrito in the car.
• Canon VIXIA HF100 Hi-Def Camcorder w/ windshield mount: for taking hi-def video. Duh. I’ll do my best to capture this to the thinkpad and get it up on YouTube/this blog each night, but I’ll likely be too drunk.
  
• Valentine 1 Radar/Laser Detector: Recommended to us by former gumballers and people with licenses suspended for excessive speed, this is supposedly the best detector around.