Mobile Tech

Early Friday

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Got off work early today (due to the holiday!). Jayson and I went down to the Apple store (see later post for details), then headed back to my place. Jay is/was selling his Treo 600 that I sold to him a few months back. He liked it but thought it was too big. he sold it on Craigslist in like 15 minutes. No fees or anything. I was impressed. We ran back to my place to grab the original box and manual for it. I always try to keep that stuff. The guy buying it picked it up today. It was no fuss, no muss.

I hung out at Jays place for a while and played with Pierre. he is suck a funny dog. We hit dinner at Burger Heaven and then I went home to relax. I ended up working on Quicken (see next post) for most of the night.

iSync Perfection or One Big Mess?

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I switched from using Entourage to iCal/Address Book for syncing my data to/from my Treo 650 on the Mac. I want the slick UI and terrific integration of Address Book & iCal, but I am concerned about some issues. Firstly I rely on Palm/outlook categories on my Treo. Primarily I use them for distinctive rings on the phone. if work calls I get a specific ring. if people I don’t want to call my cell are in a specific category they goto voice mail and don’t ring, etc. Looks like iSync does not keep the categories intact if I make changes to the categories. This sucks. If I create new contacts on my Mac I need to manually assign them categories when the contact goes onto my Palm.

It also looks like some fields don’t carry over either. I don’t see birthday’s that I entered into Outlook now that the contacts are in Address book. I think IM names are also not carried over.

Don’t get me started about my iCal invites not working in Outlook. There is some hackish fix out there but I don’t want to mess around with it.

Why then do I move/try to move to this? The integration between Address Book, iCal, iChat, Mail, etc is fantastic. That I can add a contact to address book and associate that contact to my AIM contact list in iChat is fantastic. The same goes for my jabber contacts. Linking every contact to email in Mail is also great. I can also sync everything using .Mac to my min and powerbook! Top it off with using spotlight to search everything, and I am a happy person. It makes for easy day to day use. The problem is when I want to get that information out into my Treo I run into issues. I don’t even care that I have problems when I import everything from the Treo to Outlook. I don’t want to use outlook anymore. I have had so many problems with it recently that I could live with using it just for an email archive. But at least work in the Treo!!! I am continuing my search of the internet for solutions or work around’s to my little issues. So far, no luck.

Travel Essentials

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As I said the other day, I don’t travel anywhere near as much as I used to. Just because I don’t go out of the office that much doesn’t mean that when I do I want to be any less connected. I did a quick overnight trip Monday-Tuesday. I (bored on the train) now write about what I relied on during the trek.

While in transit nothing says keeping in contact with the world like a Blackberry. When you can’t or don’t want to bring out a laptop it is essential. I hate it for everything else, including the stupid direct connect. I find that if I want to hold a conversation I might as well call the person than have a 20 minute conversation on DC. For email nothing beats the Blackberry, yet.

My powerbook was the laptop of choice this trip. My thinkpad is acting funky, and I don’t want to wipe it since I am getting a new one next week. So the powerbook stepped in and performed flawlessly (so far). I used it to watch some tv shows I recorded last week. Checked mail, did work, blogged, etc. All over Wifi!

Without the iPod I would not be sane. It makes train trips, and quiet hotel rooms that much more tolerable. It also is a great portable hard drive to store said TV shows that I watched on my powerbook. I say YES to plug and play!

My Treo is great (always carry it), but this trip it was used as it normally is. Still great, and a must for travel. What I used instead was Extension Mobility on Cisco Call Manager. It is the ability to log into any CCM phone and your extension moves with you. That coupled with the Cisco WIFI cordless phone make working in a different office just like I was in NYC, even when I was running around between 2 floors.

My new Omega X-33 watch was also a must this trip. I use my watch as an alarm wherever I go. I took my timex (broken band and all) along just in case the Omega didn’t do its job. It worked fine. I almost fell out of bed with the loudness of the alarm this morning. First impressions is this watch and I hopefully will have a long friendship!

Lastly I loved my Broadvoice VOIP phone, & Skype. I didn’t use broadvoice this trip, but I used its voice mail. I got all my VM emailed to me so I stayed in touch with everyone. I would never have checked my NYC VM without it. Skype is great since I can use it on my powerbook with my Sony Ericsson HBH-65 bluetooth headset from anywhere I have an internet connection. For this trip it was free calls from the hotel. I didn’t even need my cell phone for it. If I had broadvoice soft-phone I wouldn’t even need skype.

I have talked (praised) most of these items before, but when you use them all together you have a very smooth travel experience. I will most likely be using most if not all of this gear on my next extended trip. Now if only Amtrak could accommodate a nice ON TIME trip and travel would be painless.

The train is approaching Penn now. About an hour and 15 minutes late. So I will wrap this up so I can put the powerbook away. More mobile reviews when I use the stuff and have time to write about them! This post was written on Tuesday afternoon 5-17-05…

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T-Mobile Coverage Maps

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I have found another reason to still be happy with T-Mobile as my mobile provider. They may not be the biggest carrier in the US but they are coming up with nifty things that shouldn’t be innovative, but they are. Check out the street level coverage map. Punch in your address and it tells you how the signal strength should be. The accuracy seems correct for outside coverage. I punched up Jaysons address and it says he should have perfect coverage. he does when he is outside his place, but gets no signal in his apartment. I then punched up my companies office upstate and it accurately showed me where good signal would be and where it won’t. now I understand why there is no good signal at the train station. there is no tower nearby. Like google maps it was very fascinating to just punch up an address and see the coverage.

I don’t understand why Cingular and Verizon don’t stop treating their customers (in my opinion) like criminals and give them information like this? or allow unlocked phones, or changing price plans without signing new contracts, etc. Kudos to T-Mobile for another reason why I am still a customer even if they don’t have plans for a faster data network for a few years.

On-Call This Week

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After weeks of flying under the radar I got the joy of being “technically” on call this weekend. I mean technically since I am always on call. I get calls for problems even when I am not the person who is supposed to be called. It comes with my position. One of the worst things that can happen to me is to be sleeping and get woken up with some major systems outage. It get the same feeling I used to get when I ran on an EMS squad in college and a call would come in late at night. The only difference is being on call at work usually does not require me to go out in the cold to respond to something.

To set a good example I took the on call pager this week. Well it is not really a pager. We all have nextel’s (most with Blackberry’s), so we just route the emergency number to the Nextel of whoever is on call. Of course most of the team was happy when I got to be on call. They assume if someone calls for a non emergency I will give them a verbal beat down. They are probably correct.

No Cell Phones On The Subway

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i decided that I don’t want cell phones to work on the subway. I live off of my phone. I like having it working everywhere, but I came to a dangerous conclusion recently. Other people are not considerate. The dumb-ass who plays with his ring tones, plays games with the sound on, etc. will not have any problems having a loud conversation the entire 20 minutes that I am on the train. That would be 10 times worse than me not getting a call. Being underground with (lets face it sometimes some people with no etiquette) people who can use a phone would be bad. it is the same reason why I don’t want cell phones to work on airplanes. I think the idea is great, but I don’t trust other people to use the “privilege” properly. It is bad enough that I go onto Amtrak or the LIRR and have to sit next to chatty kathy.

My two cents from a technology enthusiast. I can stick to my ipod and reading the news while on the subway!

Hotspots

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Yesterday Jayson, Danny, & I took off to Starbucks to study (tech books), talk about work, etc. We have wanted to try that for a while but have been busy. We finally made it out. James joined us for a bit, but was busy and had to go. First, the starbucks in Union Square was noisy. Yes there are actually 2 Starbucks in Union Square but I assume the other one was as noisy as this one. Jayson says the one by his house is not as bad and he has gone to read and drink coffee for hours without problems. I felt like I was back in High School with two tables of extremly loud high school girls sitting rite by us. The place was packed. 4 of us sat at a table made for 2. Totally not the laid back experience we were looking for. not sure if I will suggest that again.

We did make productive use of our time while we were there. I tried out the T-Mobile Hotspots. I used it in Delta crown rooms before but I wanted to give it a shot at Starbucks. There were 3 free networks in range (or so the laptop said), but I couldn’t connect to any of them. So I paid. it is not cheap, but it works great. We ended up shopping for an LCD TV online. as I said in my post yesterday the specs I want are just too pricey right now.

Freedom Day

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Today is the day I have been waiting for. It is the day that my mobile phone contract is up. I rely on my mobile all the time so since february I have been thinking what I would do when this day came. My issue was I have 2 phones on the same plan. One line was under contract and the other one has not had a contract in years. The one without the contract I wanted to keep, and drop the other one that the contract just ended on. The issue is you have to change price plans when you switch off the family share plan to a single phone plan with T-Mobile. I didn’t want to change the plan type on the phone I wanted to keep and then have to get into a contract since I was making a change. I am so against contracts for crap like a cell phone that I would have switched from T-Mobile and switched providers just to prove a point that a long time customer should not have to sign contracts!

Turns out T-Mobile was super cool with my situation. They offered me a regular 1000 minute plan with no contract, but I couldn’t get unlimited nights. For the price, and the fact that I still got unlimited weekends I took it. I can always get rid of it later if I have a problem.

So after my billing cycle changes (sometime this weekend I think) I will be down to one phone and no contract! Lets just hope that when I get my bill next month they didn’t f–k anything up.

Free Palm SD Card

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I tried to fill out the form for the free 128 Meg SD card from Palm today. Since I have less than perfect vision and Palmone decided (like everyone else I know) to make the serial number microscopic I was unable to pull the info I needed for the free card. Lets face it, I don’t need the card. I already have a 512 meg SD card. Dam, I gave away a 128 meg card to Jayson already. It is the principle of the matter that I want Palmone to pay (even if it is a little bit) for putting only 32megs on their top of the line phone and got burned for doing it.

Great Product Just Got Better

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I use (sometimes) The Missing Sync 4.x from Mark/Space.  It is a palm sync utility for the Mac.  I say I sometimes use it because I have some minor issues with syncing my PDA data to Entourage.  The Missing Sync is actually a fantastic product.  They just released a new version that now supports its own Avantogo Conduit.  I can almost seamlessly sync between my Thinkpad and my Mac Mini.  The only issue I have now is the category data from Entourage getting into outlook and vice versa.

I may start using my Treo with Entourage as my main source for mail and contacts and drop outlook all together.  Of course I say that allot, but I haven’t cut the cord yet.  Dam outlook.  you love to hate it.  And recently I have truly hated it.

All I can say is that Mark/Space is a company that gets me buying Mac hardware.  Why?  Because I know innovative people like these will write software that lets me use most of what I use on my PC, like my Palm Treo!  And no I don’t work for these guys.  I just like software that does exactly what it is supposed to without major problems.