Reporting live, perhaps ..

This morning I acted as a marshal on a fun run for one of my favourite charities, The Victoria Foundation. I thought it would be a great opportunity to try out a number of technologies in the field to see how well I could report live from an event.  Let me tell you how I got on

• The key problem I encountered was poor 3G coverage on Wimbledon common. If I found it frustrating then it must be a nightmare for folks who live there. I am with T-Mobile but a fellow marshal, sporting Vodafone, experienced similar problems. Thank goodness nobody had an accident otherwise we would have all been in trouble.
• My next problem was the sun light. Whilst it was glorious it made reading my IPhone almost impossible.
• Then there was the size of the text on my phone. I need reading glasses so I spent the entire race juggling sunglasses and reading glasses - luckily for everyone I managed to avoid too many key stroke disasters. Most of the time I could be seen sporting 2 pairs of glasses, not very attractive.
• Upload time for photos, associated with Tweets/Blogs, reduced the amount of 'live' action I could report. Is this normal?
• Network drop outs meant I was never quite sure whether a news item got through, subsequent duplications proved that they had, sorry to all my followers.
• My 'old' IPad is not 3G so I couldn't use that until I got back to base. Why I should have to pay T-Mobile for 3G for my IPad, as well as my IPhone is beyond me - I can only only use one a time and that was difficult enough.
• I found the keyboard on my IPhone very irritating, its bad enough that I can't read the text but typing is a pain as well , even with my dainty fingers! Oh and the screen got very smeary with sun tan lotion.
• Why can't I upload photos from my Nikon directly to my IPhone or IPad? The camera on my IPhone isn't bad but its not as good as my Nikon. Come on Apple why isn't there a USB port on the IPad - I wish I had bought a Macbook Air now (my husband did suggest that but I bought an IPad and a MacBook Pro instead :0(  - thought i might need a DVD drive) I had to wait until I got home, uploaded all my photos to IPhoto and then copied them all to Flickr etc. etc. or have I missed something???