One of the things that made my trip to India and England so successful was seamless wireless connectivity. I thought I'd go into some detail about this, because it might be useful for future travellers.
As I've described before, my phone is a Palm Treo 650 *, with service from Cingular. It's a quad-band GSM phone, and supports GPRS (IP over PPP) Internet access. (This is critical: if you plan to travel to most parts of the world, you must get a GSM phone. It's the standard; just get over it.) The Treo includes a basic but adequate email client called Versamail, which can handle POP, IMAP, and SMTP with and without SSL. This means that I can access both my Sun email (Edgemail via secure IMAP) and my personal ISP account (via POP). There's also a web browser called Blazer which does a reasonable job of rendering complex web sites on the 320x320 screen. And since it's a PalmOS device it also supports a wide range of applications; the one that I used most often was World Clock, without which it would have been really hard to keep track of the 101/2 hour time difference between Boston and Bangalore. (I also installed Bejeweled 2 as a superior time-waster to solitaire.)
As I noted earlier, I called Cingular to enable international roaming before leaving the US. Everywhere I went - in India and in the UK - I established a usable roaming connection when I turned on the phone. However the automatic choice was not always the best one. Several of the providers didn't support GPRS (or didn't allow GPRS roaming), which meant that I couldn't get my email. After manually selecting each of the available providers, I eventually determined that the best choices were Airtel in India and Orange in the UK.
Looking back on this trip, I cannot emphasize too strongly how important it was to have a working cellphone (with web and email) while travelling in India. It's not cheap, but roaming calls back to the US and UK were certainly less expensive than hotel phone rates. The normal way of getting around in India is to book a driver and car for the day; your driver will expect you to contact him by cell phone whenever you need him. When the power goes out (rarely, but inevitably), or when that WiFi hotspot turns out to require the use of a prepaid coupon that can only be purchased somewhere else, you can still use email. And most important, the successful resolution of my Mumbai connection situation depended heavily on the use of voice, email, and web; first in Bangalore airport, then on the shuttle bus to Mumbai's international terminal, and finally as I stalked the corridors of Mumbai airport at 3am.
One final thought. I packed my iSight camera in the hope of using iChatAV to videoconference with friends and family rather than using the phone. Well, it didn't work out. The main reason was that most of the hotels used firewalls that blocked several of the TCP ports needed by iChatAV. Maybe a simple VoIP system would have been better....
--
*One point worth noting is that the Treo 650 includes a camera, albeit a fairly basic one. Photography is forbidden in many places in India, and you will frequently be required to check any cameras or camera-equipped phones. If I were buying now, I'd be tempted by the Siemens SX66, which doesn't have a camera but does include WiFi - and it's only 2.1 ounces!
I have had the problem with having to check my phone here at some events, like pre-release movie screenings, its no fun at all. Before seeing The Chorus/Choir (which was great movie.) I was scanned for a camera phone, and got caught! I had it off, next time I will remove the battery.
I still want a Treo!
Posted by: Susan in St. Paul at November 7, 2005 03:47 PMI am amazed that you were able to use Cingular in India-because we can't get it to work well here, in Southern California at all! Sylvain uses my phone 1/3 of the time because Cingular coverage here is so bad! (I have Verizon.) Though (And I underline "though") I also suspect that much of his problem has to do with his LG phone. I'm ashamed that such a a peice of cr*p has MY initials on it!
Anyway, your report on wireless communications was very interesting...Very!
Laura
p.s.-I've wasted many a minute on Bejeweled-but my new favourite cell phone time waster is Collapse!
Posted by: Laura G. at November 8, 2005 11:09 AMRemember that I wasn't using Cingular in India: I was using various local GSM networks. All that Cingular had to do was mark my account as "international roaming OK", authorize the roaming requests when they came through, and add the charges to my bill when Airtel posted them.
Posted by: Geoff Arnold at November 8, 2005 11:19 AMMy Samsung is so obviously a camera phone, but I haven't been caught yet with a contraband camera phone...but if I'm someplace where I see a sign forbidding them, I turn it off and put it in my bag or pocket. I've been looking at some new Motorola camera phones, and some of those-even the video phones-I can't even tell that they're camera phones! (Can't easily find the lens.)
After having traveled with you for a part of the trip - you will be impressed to know that I have now purchased a Treo 650 as well. I learned my lesson and will shortly have access to my email as they move me to edge mail in the next couple of weeks!
I couldn't agree with Geoff more - you need the phone, and you should also get access to your email from anywhere.
Posted by: Dale at November 9, 2005 05:15 PM