I read somewhere recently that I retired after selling Speedgoat. This comes as a huge relief, given how concerned I’ve been about finding a job, and I can’t wait to tell my wife that I’m not currently unemployed, but actually retired. I’m also happy to report that this means the American Dream is alive and well, and that it is possible to retire at 40, provided you’re willing and able to find work again pretty soon after, and put in another thirty to forty years of gainful employment while retired.

It can’t all be polo matches on white tigers and Lamborghini derbies for carefree guys like me, though, so I found myself at Interbike earlier this month, walking around, taking pictures, and writing stuff down. What was different this year–aside from no longer representing the company I owned for fourteen years–was that I covered the entire show live, using a single device.

Whatever disorder compels me to obsess about bikes and bike parts seems to have grown to include gadgets in the past few years. Particularly mobile devices. Very particularly, Android phones. For what it’s worth then, here’s what I used to photograph, edit, and post to my blog during the show.

It’s an HTC Thunderbolt, which is a Verizon 4G LTE phone–a fancy way of saying it’s stupid-fast connected to the interwebs, anywhere you can get a 4G signal. If you’ve not seen a Verizon 4G phone load web pages and stuff, I can tell you, it’s a thing of beauty. After a brief and tempestuous relationship with the free WiFi provided by Interbike and the Sand’s Expo (constant fails), I finally gave up on WiFi altogether, flipped on 4G, and uploaded photos and posted blog entries the entire day using it.

You can find specs on the Thunderbolt all over the web, but it has a 4.3″ screen, an 8MP autofocus camera with dual LED flashes, a front-facing camera, a massive 32GB micro SD card, a 1GHz single core Qualcomm processor, and some of the worst battery life on anything, ever.

So I was using the Seido extended battery, which ups stock juice storage from 1400 mAh to 2750 mAh, and still, each day I was going through not one, not two, but three batteries–two stock 1400s and the big 2750.

Eight megapixel camera or not, the stock camera app on the Thunderbolt is piss poor, so I shot everything with an app called Camera Magic. Absolutely the best camera I’ve found for Android phones.

Mad thumb pumping seamlessly channeled my innermost thoughts into squiggly lines some of you could interpret thanks to the Swiftkey keyboard. Anyone who thinks he or she has a better keyboard for any phone is just plain wrong. This is The One.

Every image loaded automatically into a great media management program called Quickpic, which let me share each image in a variety of ways, including pushing them to the WordPress app for blog upload.

Battery life being what it was, my little Thunderbolt left it all on the field each day, but this setup let me send a lot of data from the show in real-time, while walking around texting and walking into people. An app called JuiceDefender let me get as many hours as I did on the phone.

I never thought I’d see the day when I didn’t drag my laptop along–and I hauled it to Vegas for good measure this time around, too–but I just didn’t need it, and that was impressive.