Welcome to the jungle: The best tech when going off the grid
Last Christmas, my cousin Martin do Nascimento received a Kindle 3G as a gift from my brother, Alex.
At the time, we all figured it would be a nice way for Martin to read books while serving in the Peace Corps Nicaragua on the Caribbean coast. But what we didn’t know at the time was exactly how indispensable it would be to him as he lived in a town so small that it barely has a Wikipedia entry. It turns out that this little, relatively cheap device has been a godsend for him in 2012, with its worldwide 3G Internet. Even though Martin lives in a remote area, I hear from him nearly every day by e-mail.
"Most of my e-mails I write on my Kindle," he told me recently (by cell phone this time). "I use it to stay in touch with friends, even [through] Facebook. The Kindle’s not fantastic by any means, but I can read my e-mail reliably. It loads within a minute. Even with a 3G [USB modem] stick, [service] came in and out—I gave the modem away."
