Mobile Tech

My Mistery Trip

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I am writing this on the return leg of my “semi” mystery trip. I say that because no one at work really was supposed to know what we were doing this week. Apparently others are not good at keeping things quiet. I told who needed to know in my group but they always are privy to corporate secrets. that is just the nature of the jobs we have, but the rumor mill is running rampant it seems. I wrote a post all about exactly what we are doing, but it is on my private work blog right now. There it will remain until I am long gone from my current employer. I feel that the smart way to write about stuff from work. I want to write about it but cant publish it.

I can say we were doing some research. It was a very busy 3 days, and then we took yesterday to relax a bit. On this trip we ate very well. Man the food was good. Traveling always lets you eat well and gain weight. I also got the chance to see some really cool technology in action.

We rented an Iridium phone for the week because we were concerned about mobile coverage and the price of service even if we had good signal. It turned out that the Iridium phones are huge, and only really work outside. On the flip side my Cingular GSM phone actually worked so we simply used that. I don’t want to look at my bill this month since the price per minute was very high, but when you need to make an important cal you need to make a call.

I went the almost the entire trip without needing my migraine medication. Right before I got on the plane I felt like I needed to take something. At least I had a good run without the extra medication.

The trip out was uneventful. our short mini trip was nice. I have to say even smaller foreign air carriers have better service than american carriers. In the US you would never see a hot breakfast on an hour long flight but we had one.

On the return trip I went from having an asle seat in the very back of the plane to a decent window seat in an exit row. And I actually did someone a favor with that change. Go figure. The leg room is nice, especially since the carrier we are on was cramped on the way down. Hopefully the remainder of the trip will be uneventful.

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Back to GSM

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After a false start earlier this year with Cingular I finally made the switch and went back to GSM. I picked Cingular over T-Mobile because of higher speed data network and a better selection of phones. I still don’t like some of the business practices of Cingular but high speed data is high speed data. I went with the new Treo 680 with the Palm OS. My switch also means I decoupled my account with my companies corporate account. It worked out since we needed to give someone a data plan that didn’t have it already anyway.

I love the 680 but I have two issues. First is the fact that it is very sluggish sometimes with its input. Not all the time, but enough to be a pain. jayson said that his Treo 700p did the same thing but my 700p never did. The other issue is with poor battery life. It is not as good as the 700. I ordered a spare battery that should help, but I would like to make it a day without switching batteries.

Another good thing about GSM is that for $30 I took my locked Cingular Treo and had it unlocked. Not bad since the unlocked model costs $400, and Cingular only charges $199 (after rebate).

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Wireless Broadband Woes

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This weekend I broke out the Verizon Wireless Broadband card I have for my work computer to test it to ensure that it worked for my trip. Turns out it didn’t. I spend about an hour reinstalling the software a few times and troubleshooting as best as I could. I ended up giving up and called Verizon on Monday for help. My knowledge on the subject and my volunteering all that I did got me right escalated to a level 2 guy and then a relatively quick answer for my problem when he was stumped also. It turns out when you actually know as much or more about the system you are calling about you tend to get the tech support guys to get you to someone higher up quick. Something (they didn’t say what) wasn’t provisioned on my account properly even though the card worked a week and a half ago when I used it last.

So far the card has been working for my trip. I do have to say (hopefully I won’t jinx myself) that the coverage and quality of service on Verizon is better than what I had with T-Mobile. I am just personally not a fan of the company and some of the customer service practices. Won’t go into them here, but you get the idea if you read past posts. In general the service is still great though.

I will blog about the details of the trip in other posts to come.

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The Evil Empire Is Evil, But Has Good Signal

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After an issue with really poor signal at our new office while setting up some gear we have decided to ditch our Nextell’s. I like the direct connect, but having the phones work and recieving email all the time on the Blackberry’s are more important than having a cool feature. So we took the plunge and got Verizon Wireless phones. I personally don’t like the heavy handed tacktics they use to keep customers (2 year deals, and limited time frames to upgrade phones) but their service is still probibly the best in NYC. I finally ported my number from my personal T-Mobile line over and now am very happy with my new Treo 700P on the EVDO data service.

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Drinks With Friends

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Gretchen came into the city today and Jayson and I had lunch with her, her cousin, and her cousin’s friend. We went to Old Town. It was good as usual. Dealt with the usual busy stuff at work, and then I got an IM from John wanting to know if I wanted drinks after work. I didn’t have much going on so I said why not. Jayson was out at the Nextel store getting some new Blackberry’s for work but wanted to go also. Man we should not have waited for him. It took him forever, then he needed to go get Gretchen a new phone at Cingular so that took a while also. John and I ended up waiting for them for like an hour.

We finally hit a nearby bar restaurant we like. I didn’t drink much and had some appetizers. John wanted me to go play poker with him but I had an early meeting on Tuesday so I passed.

As a side note Jay got a new Blackberry 7100, and a new guy got one also. We handed down Jayson’s old 7520 to someone who destroyed their old one. I like the size of the smaller 7100’s, and I know it is easy to learn the keypad setup, but I just can’t bring myself to get one. My 7520 is big, but I am sticking with it for now.

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Or Not To Join!

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My tryout trip with Cingular and my HP iPaq phone didn’t go so well for Cingular and the phone. First I should say the phone didn’t even get really used on the trip. By the time I was ready for the trip I had decided that the Windows Mobile phone software was too clunky to use all the time, and that the iPaq was nice as a PDA but was too big to use as a phone. Having it reboot 3 times while I was trying to sync it with my Mac didn’t help it.

With the Windows Mobile woes I figured I might as well try out the Cingular SIM in my Treo and see if the service was better and if the “high speed” data was worth the extra money. In NYC the signal seemed fine for singular. It even worked on the tracks in Penn Station. At my companies upstate office however where I had great service with T-Mobile I had 1 bar or no service with Cingular.

The data plan worked fine with no configuration necessary. But it wasn’t noticeably faster than my T-Mobile data plan that was half the price. Wanting to test that I used my Treo as a DUN modem and connected to the internet on my Powerbook using both Cingular and T-Mobile. The Treo 650 supports Cingular’s EDGE network and should have given me performance somewhere in the 100k range. I ran the CNET speed test and got a response of 26k. I tried my T-Mobile SIM on the same phone and got performance of around 60k +. That was what I expected with T-Mobiles GPRS system. That was the final decision to get out of my Cingular trial. The bad signal at my office was almost a death kneel, but paying double for a data plan that was slower was the final straw.

I will give Cingular credit. They are true to their 30 day money back policy for the service and phone. I had no problems returning the device and canceling the service. I say that before I get the bill for usage I had, but I think everything should be ok. If they improve the data speeds and service in the area I travel to I would look at them again, but for now I am fine with T-Mobile.

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Join An Evil Empire?

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I have pondered switching mobile carriers for a while. I have always ended up staying with T-Mobile. I have had them for almost 4 years and all in all they have been ok. But besides being cheap, and offering GSM they don’t have that much going for them. Well except nice customer service. That is a plus but for the once a year I call is it worth all the other trade offs? They offer the worst phones. Their high speed data plans may be cheap but they are really slow.

I have been eying the HP iPaq 6515 Windows Mobile phone for a while. Cingular offers it. It has a nice size screen and a keyboard. It is larger than my Treo 650 but the larger screen is REALLY nice. I saw it in the store today on my day off of shopping. I was originally not going to switch but I was surprised to find they had the iPaq in stock (they didn’t several other times I went to the store trying to take a look at it). I was impressed with the screen size, and the fact that the whole unit was not much bigger than the Treo even thought it was wider.

To make a long story short I made an semi impulse buy and am on my way to switching mobile carriers to Cingular. Now I have 30 days to see if I like the phone and the service, but for now I am switching. I will pay almost double for the data plan I had, but I am also (in theory) more than doubling the speed of the wireless data. The plan I am moving to is almost identical to what I had. 900 minutes vs the 1000 that T-Mobile gave me for the same price. The advantage is that I get roll over minutes now. Some months I use allot of minutes but others I almost never use any, so now I can roll over unused minutes to the next month.

I am going on a trip tomorrow so I will give the phone and service a real trial. More news later.

Oh and as for the title of the post I think most large telecom companies are evil. I love them, and use them all the time, but when something goes wrong you are at there mercy. You are in a contract that you cannot get out of, they can be very evil. But at least it is an evil you know!

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Crackberry

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I finally got my replacement Blackberry yesterday. My old one was fried. It did a ton of quirky things. I finally had enough when it wouldn’t connect to any computer and I lost all my contacts out of it. This new one seems ok. I have all my contacts synced up and I can see caller ID now. I can get back to using it again. I was starting to go through withdrawal from not having it. That was interesting since there where weeks I didn’t use it or didn’t want to use it because I could use my Treo for allot of the same functions. But I always end up back with the crackberry since it really is the best thing for real time mobile email.

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Treo Refresh

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Last night I ended up wiping my Treo 650 and reinstalling all my software. I have been having issues with it rebooting every time I tried to sync my mail using Snappermail. That program is half the reason I use my Treo over the Blackberry, so I was not too happy when it started acting up earlier this week. I had to go on my trip Thursday without being able to use the Treo for email. I got by on the Razr and the Blackberry but I like the Treo better. After the reinstall Snappermail seems to be working. But I have had 2 random reboots since the hard reset. Once after a call to my sister right after I got out of the subway this morning. The other when I was syncing with my Powerbook. The sync reboot also happened often before I wiped the Treo, but I am not sure if it is because of the config on my Powerbook or the Treo.

I will try using for a while longer, but if the random reboots continue I will have to seriously consider an alternate PDA phone. As much as I like this device, I cannot have it randomly rebooting on me almost daily!

New Used Blackberry

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About 2 weeks ago I got a new Blackberry 7520. Well it is new to me. Someone else at work had it, and never used it. They finally gave it up saying give it to someone who will use it. My group was having a new guy start so we were going to give him the Blackberry. Instead of giving him a new one, I decided to “upgrade” mine and give the older hardware to the new guy. Hey he is the new guy.

Well the musical Blackberry’s don’t end there. Someone else’s Blackberry broke this week. Instead of waiting for the replacement we configured my old one up for her to use, and we can wait for the refurbed unit for the new guy.

The new Blackberry is very similar to the old one. The major enhancements are the screen, and screen brightness of the backlight. It is a night and day improvement. Also the new unit has bluetooth so I can use my wireless headset on it, if I wanted to.

I also went out and bought Pocket Mac for the Blackberry. Now I can sync the Blackberry address book with my Mac!