Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Tag Archives: iPhone

Incidence of Gadgets

Travelling as much as I do, I have noticed quite a big change over the last decade in the range of gadgets carried by travellers. It used to be the case that you saw most business travellers with their Nokia 6210 mobile phones and some actually had laptops ranging from the hulking huge to the micro, but the ordinary ‘civilan’ at best would have a mobile and possibly a portable cd player or tape player.

Today, pretty much 90% of travellers (including holiday makers) take at least one laptop with them, ranging from the hip Apple to the much more regular netbooks. I also have to say it to the ‘netbooks are dead’ fraternity, the MAJORITY of computers I see particularly amongst the holiday maker is the Netbook – an Acer or an Asus. Everyone has a mobile, and certainly near 50% have a smartphone of some sort (although including any Nokia in this classification is almost heresy). Most smartphones are of the Blackberry variety (the business man) but with a rapidly growing number of Apple iPhone and Android devices.

Over the last six months though I have seen a change, in that I am regularly seeing the incidence of tablets and eReaders, with tablets occuring more regularly than the latter. As a rule the eReader of choice is definitely the Amazon Kindle, with a few Sony eReaders occurring. Today I have seen 3 Kindles amongst those waiting for my flight.

Now with the tablets however, I see the iPad primarily, but this week I have seen Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 inch devices and (a new one for me) the Blackberry Playbook. Today I saw 4 iPads, 1 Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 inch, and 1 Playbook amongst my fellow travellers. The occurence of music players is now almost nil, apart from Apple iPod Touches, with almost everyone you see going through their smartphones. Goodbye MP3 player, we knew you for such a short time.

I wonder what the future brings?

Powered Flight…

… or in other words, having a good charging solution for your charge hungry smartphone, MiFi and tablet. This is where the A-solar Power Bank Pro comes in.a-solar-power-bank-pro

I have always prided myself on always having the best tech, particularly when it comes to smartphones, Wi-Fi gadgets and tablets. However one of the banes of my life is the poor battery life that much of this kit comes with, particularly with the smartphones. One solution I have had is to always make use of the latent charging capabilities of my netbook/notebook, by ensuring that I can charge everything over standard USB leads. This has worked well but it has not been always the most ergonomic solution, with cables appearing out of bags and always having to ensure that I am charging on shutdown to ensure that the port power is not shutdown when I go into suspend mode (I know some laptops do have an always on port).

So I cast around and found the A-solar Power Bank Pro, which gives me 5000mAh of charging goodness. This can be fed to your USB based devices either via a standard USB output with 500mA capability, or via the very iPad and MiFi friendly 1000mA USB output. The key and very important feature here is that they can be both used at the same time to charge two devices, even a combination of iPhone and iPad. I have now been using this for a good three months during which I have kept myself running during long travel days into and out of London, as well as the much more demanding weekend in Amsterdam, whilst I was running around Koninginnedag. The London travel days stressed my Smartphone battery through running it fully active (browsing and tweeting) for the full 4 hours of travel time each day, plus all the normal usage going from meeting to meeting, including heavy GPS usage from the Walking Directions features of Google Navigation. A much more demanding test of its capability was the Koninginnedag weekend, during which I double handed an iPhone and an Android phone, taking video and photographs and posting to Facebook and Twitter throughout the day via an unlocked MiFi. It kept me going so I never lost connectivity and never lost a photo opportunity. It even charges overnight from a standard USB port, so it really cuts out the need to have an additional power block, and it fits well within an inside or outside suit pocket, or cargo trousers/shorts.

This is an excellent device to extend your smartphone, iPad, iPhone or MiFi life on even the heaviest data usage days, and can really recommend you get one, and at between €39 and €49 it is a snip. I got mine whilst passing through Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, for the lower price Smile

Perfect Traveller Mobile

After a poor discussion with mobile phone operator regarding upgrades to iPhone4 (no I will not pay £290 AND a 2 year contract for an upgrade), I decided to go elsewhere for a new mobile phone. I had to get a new one primarily because my iPhone3′s battery life was degrading at such a rate that I could not get through half the day before it had to be charged. Of course Apple had made that design decision early on that the battery was not a user changeable aspect of the phone.

This got me thinking about what makes the ideal mobile for the traveller, and I came up with the following list:

1. Smartphone, not ordinary phone – because you need to carry your entire address book with you and have email/web access at all times, because you never know when your itinerary changes and everything has to be at your fingertips
2. Unlocked – for switching in local Sims
3. Good all day battery life – because it has to work all day under normal usage
4. Standard charger – because you will forget or lose yours
5. USB charging – because your laptop is a great battery recharger
6. WiFi connectivity – because 3G data roaming costs a fortune
7. GPS – because you need a mapping application to figure out where you are and where you are going to

I used some of these ideas in finding my new phone (an Android 2.1 based middle of the range/budget device), but what makes your ideal phone?

iPhone and Travel

iphone-4When travelling it is always a great idea to have an unlocked mobile phone but this can turn out to be expensive especially if have an iPhone. You need an unlocked mobile to take advantage of local PAYG and even contract deals that can give you lower cost calls and, more importantly, lower cost data. Some good news though has come out regarding T-Mobile in the Netherlands, if they are your provider, in that they will now allow you to unlock your phone – after all, they still have you in their clutches with regard to the contract.

This has already been the case with O2 in the UK for some time. The method is a little different from a normal phone in that at the end of the messaging from O2 (and probably so for T-Mobile in NL) then you need to re-activate the mobile phone with iTunes with the new SIM in the device, with the extra fuss with needing to have a microsim for the iPhone 4.

So if you want to unlock your O2 UK iPhone, you need to go to the special section on the O2 website and follow the instructions in full.

Everyone Mobile

An interesting statistic crossed my path the other day, and that was the fact that 2 million iPhones had been sold in the UK. Now I have not fact checked this little nugget, but it is impressive even if it is half true. That is 1 iPhone for every 30 people in the UK. The iPhone is not all the smartphones that are out there, so combining with the numbers of Blackberrys, Nokia and Windows Mobile devices, you can say that the UK has taken a major shift towards mobile computing in the palm of their hand. The rest of the world is also going this way, and this accounts for why I feel so ‘me too’ when I see so many iPhone devices out there. I might even have to change my message tones as I hear other peoples’ around me.

Makes you wonder why SMS is even used any more considering how many people have mobile email!

Hopefully the number of people out there using these devices whilst travelling may actually encourage the mobile operators to reduce data roaming costs… maybe.

iPhone Battery Life… improvements

10-15-07-iphone The iPhone has (like many 3G smartphones) always had poor battery life when using connectivity for email sync etc. As new firmwares have become available, this life has improved generally, so that I have only had to recharge twice a day sometimes. However with the release of the 3.1 firmware, my battery life took a tumble so that I was in fact charging four times a day. This has been documented elsewhere on the Internet, and as a travelling man this had become almost impossible to keep going through the whole business day. Even with going to the 3.1.2 firmware, there was no improvement.

Then I accidentally left the WiFi on after leaving one office with WiFi and went to another office without WiFi. I did not really notice but suddenly my phone was back to and exceeded my previous battery life. WTF! Further tests with both my iPhones (yes I have two, one for each country) concluded further that this is a real affect and is not proven explainable although I have a theory that I would love checking. Technically turning WiFi should cause a REDUCTION in battery life.

The theory that I have is that Apple have boosted the transmission power on the iPhone 3G radio to allow it to better operate on the US ATT network which is notoriously poor in many US states. This causes the battery to drain further, and also explains why it was not ‘fixed’ in the 3.1.2 release – as it is not something they want to fix as it is solving a US issue that they are getting a lot of flack for. However, the moment you turn the WiFi on I believe that drops the 3G transmission power back to previous levels, which when WiFi is only beacon’ing (trying to find another WiFi network) means a reduced power draw and better battery life. The other evidence is that I note that the iPhones are noticeably warmer when only on 3G.

Not sure if this is really true, but all I know is that my phones now last a lot longer. Try it, it can only improve things.

Travelling … service resuming

ASUS1005HA Things have been a little quiet on the site for a while, mainly because I have been involved in a pretty intense period of project work which has required me to do a multi-country commute for almost six months now. During this time, I have really appreciated the smallness of my netbook main machine and gained a (poor) appreciation of hotel provided WiFi, as well as just how far ahead of the game the UK is in Mobile Broadband (particularly in terms of PAYG tariffs). I have also experienced a sea change in my phone experiences also as I have moved from Windows Mobile to the Apple iPhone. One thing I can really push is that the iPhone has proven a worthy secondary device to go with the MSI Wind netbook – not a replacement, just a secondary device. With the release of the v3.0 software, the Apple iPhone has become a great business device for the mobile worker, particularly one that travels to multiple countries. The applications and the iTunes App store are THE killer aspect for the phone. So much in fact, I had to get two – one for the UK and one for the remote country :-) . I guess an iPhone with support for two SIMs is still too much of a specialised requirement.

More on that another time, but I would like to return to the ‘secondary’ device comment. Walking around, the iPhone is a great emailer and mobile work business helper but it simply cannot replace a PC for working email and documents. You do need a PC to get the job done, and netbooks are really a good package for that, particularly when you have a large screen and keyboard installation in your semi-permanent working locations.  Working with the MSI Wind though has really punched my buttons with regard to battery life – my MSI Wind is simply too short lived at 4 hours, although good for many I am now looking at the latest batch of machines that give 8+ hours. However I am torn between waiting for Windows 7 based machines or getting an XP based machine now. I will have to see how long I can tough that one out. You can sense an update coming…

How about your experiences with iPhone? Netbook? Recommendations for a long life battery netbook? Feel free to comment.

Mobile Phones – is 3G worth it?

I recently changed my mobile from a GSM only HTC Vox S710 to a HTC Touch Dual 3G mobile phone. The switch is a short term one as the switch was because the S710 was really beat up and scratched, and the Touch Dual was available at a steal of a price. It has given me however a chance to see if 3G on a phone is actually useful.

I hear you say, of course it is..  but right now I am edging towards the view that 3G for a phone is of little or no use except in the most extreme of instances. I am not talking about using the device as a modem for PC browsing, but whether the increased power usage and higher browsing speed are actually ok or not. To be honest for PC access over 3G, the best option is to get a 3G dongle or a laptop with the required radio already inbult – this allows you to use your phone and laptop at the same time, something I am always doing.

What I can say about the on-phone browsing and email download side of things, well I really do not notice the difference. With the email, I am reading small text messages and rarely open any attachments which explains it pretty much. With browsing, the performance is just simply not noticeably different – and I am talking about full screen browsing through the Opera Mini browser. Opera does a great job of compressing/caching the content so that operation over 2G is absolutely fine. The only place I saw a benefit for the speed is when I did have cause to open an attachment, but this is so rare as to not matter and we are talking about at most double the download time. I could see this difference being greater as I receive bigger attachments, but that just does not happen right now nor do I make use of it yet when running around. One special thought though is that I now have Qik video on the phone and that definitely does justify the speed of 3G, but using Qik I run directly into the other big problem of 3G phones – they suck power like it was going out of fashion.

I hear you say this must be the phone – after all it is a sucky Windows Mobile 6.1 device. Nope, I hear the same complaints from persons with other 3G phones such as the iPhone. Making use of the 3G service and the video on the device can really empty the battery purely because 3G phones require more processing power than the bog standard 2G phones.

So like many others who have moved to 3G, I now manage my life differently. I try not to be far away from a power source and recharge whenever I can. I am also eyeing up a spare battery or even the enhanced life version that makes the phone really thick. I am not however going to drop back to the 2G life – the video features are very nice, and that processor speed is also very nice in the OS giving the phone that nippy feature. It has however made me think twice about a non-replaceable battery phone like the iPhone, as charging is needed twice a day in real use because of my addiction to data access and push mail. I will just have to see what is available in August this year, when I feel I will need to upgrade again.

My thoughts however may be swayed if I do suffer too many battery out incidents.

What do you think of 3G phones?

Redfly – a miss by a mile

CelioRedfly Celio is a company that has produced the Redfly Smartphone Terminal since earlier this year. They have just released new update hardware in terms of the C7 and C8N, where the differentials are purely in screen size, weight and ‘Media Port’ – all of this for between $229 and $299 (I would expect that to be £180 to £230 over here – around the same RRP as the EeePC 4G to EeePC 900 / Acer Aspire One devices). These are interesting and novel devices which require a Windows Mobile phone to actually provide the processing and software aspect, because they are nothing more than a glorified screen and keyboard. Interesting – yes, successful – no.

This device competes in the same realm as netbooks with none of their advantages of providing you with a similar/same environment to work in as a full desktop, with full client application functionality. What about web applications I hear you ask? well unfortunately this device requires a Windows Mobile Phone as its only host, which means it is hamstrung with the same application limitations – a shoddy browser that is circa 1998 in capability.

They do cling to the enterprise market and push for data security as one of its advantages but sorry, data leaves the company just as easily on a Windows Mobile Phone as for a laptop and is just as obtainable – without going anywhere near my own mantra about the silliness of enforced control measures on devices when the true knowledge in a company is in the employee’s head, and they leave the company every night and no-one requires people’s brains to be locked down. You can use good common sense security mechanisms on a netbook, with greater capability than you can with the Celio Redfly / Windows Mobile combination (can you encrypt the entire storage of a Windows Mobile Phone?).

No, I cannot recommend such a device for anyone. Get a good netbook and a decent mobile phone instead (I say this, and I have a Windows Mobile Phone but then I feel comfortable with its lack of features in the web and application side and I use Exchange for contacts/calendar – the iPhone is calling me right now).