Macopinion

Laptopless Traveling, Part 2

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

[In Part 1, Marc wrote about deciding to take week-long a cross-country trip with only his iPhone and report on the results.]

The trip started on a Saturday. Everything went well: as I was going to the airport I received an iPhone call from my brother, whom I was going to meet in L.A., and he reported everything was on schedule on his end. At the airport, security was a breeze, with one exception: in my haste to strip for the metal detector (shows, wallet, keys, etc.) I forgot to remove the iPhone from my belt clip and set off the alarm! Fortunately, my bag hadn't gone through the x-ray yet, so I tossed it inside and passed the metal detector and retrieved all my things on the other side safely.

Portland International Airport (PDX) has free wifi throughout the airport, so I gave it a try on my iPhone. The connection strength was not great (two bars), but worked fine. I read through some emails and answered a couple. I decided to sent an email to my great-uncle who I was going to visit in Missouri, letting him know I was on my way. But the message could not be sent. This was either due to a problem with my email server or the poor connection. I tried switching from wifi to Edge, but that didn't help. I turned off everything by switching to airplane mode, and then turned the wireless back on, but still the message just sat there trying to send but not going anywhere. I thought about canceling the email but couldn't even do that. The iPhone's email program places pending messages in a temporary folder called "Outbox" -- but though I could see the message there, I couldn't edit it or move it. Eventually the plane started boarding and I had to shut the phone down to get on board.

Later, during the flight, I wondered how Mail would work in airplane mode. When I tried to access it, I was given a warning and an opportunity to turn airplane mode off, but when I cancelled that, I was at least able to browse my email inbox. I have an IMAP account for email, which stores the email on an email server, so presumably the actual messages would not be accessible.

But it struck me that the Outbox folder, since it was created dynamically by the iPhone, wouldn't be subject to this limitation. Sure enough, I was not only able to browse the message, but I was able to move the message out of the Outbox to my Drafts folder and then edit it!

Later, when I arrived at LAX, I simply changed the message's subject to "Just Arrived in LA" and send it, and this time it went out just fine. Apparently that email sending problem in Portland was just an odd fluke, probably due to my email server's security system. (For security, my email server will only let you send out messages after you check for new email. This is so spammers can't use the server's open SMTP service. I've occasionally ran into problems with Mail in Mac OS X and iPhone's Mail where it tries to send first, which causes an error. Being able to move a "stuck" message from Outbox to Drafts solves the problem because I can then check for new email before I send the message.)

On the flight to LA, I used the iPhone to capture some cool views out the airplane window. Later I decided to watch some TV. Last spring I had recorded but never watched the last half-dozen episodes of House, MD (one of my favorite shows), so I had moved these to my iPhone for my trip. I then watched one and a half episodes on the flight which was my first extended video-watching on the iPhone. It worked wonderfully, with the screen being extremely watchable from many angles. I thought I might get tired holding the iPhone up to watch it (I tried propping it up on the tray table with a book, but it kept slipping off) but surprisingly it was fine. I changed positions often, but that was due more to the uncomfortable airplane seat.

This TV viewing was interrupted by an impromptu "iPhone demonstration" I had to perform for the couple seated next to me who had noticed it and were full of questions. (The woman had a monster-sized Dell laptop she was using to watch a movie with. I think the thing came with a free neck brace to help you cope with the strain of carrying it.) I was curious what these non-Apple people thought of the iPhone. Their impressions were very positive before I demoed it, with the woman mainly being concerned with the tie-in to AT&T. Both were ecstatic and amazed when I showed them how the iPhone worked. Of course my demo was limited -- I couldn't show them phone calling, Safari, Mail, Google Maps, or anything else that requires network access -- but even the demo of the iPod, address book, photos, typing, and other things had their jaws hanging open. (By the way, the quickest way to impress someone is to show them how to zoom in and out of a photo and flick through a whole list of photos or contacts.) I don't know if I made an iPhone sale or not, but the two were really envious.

Arriving in LA, I connected with my brother Dave on my iPhone and found he was on his way to the airport, but stuck in traffic (he drove down from the Bay Area, where he lives). When he arrived we headed for our hotel (I'd made reservations on the Internet).

Now my brother's got a built-in GPS system in his car, but it has an incredibly lame limitation: you cannot interact with it while the car is moving! This means you have to stop and park in order to look up a location for navigating. Ever tried to park in LA? Not only is the minimum speed on the freeways 80 mph, but you can't find parking places on regular roads. Besides, on this particular trip we often didn't have specific destinations in mind -- we were just wandering, impulsively deciding to go somewhere -- exactly the kind of behavior the built-in GPS wouldn't allow.

While I understand the safety issues of navigating while driving, the stupid thing is the GPS won't even let me, a passenger, operate it while Dave watches the road!

So it turned out, that though we were in a car with a GPS navigation system, we used my iPhone's Google Maps app for most of our navigating. I was the navigator for our time in LA, looking up restaurants and places to visit and directing my brother. This worked astonishingly well (even over "slow" Edge), and I even made use of Google Maps' traffic feature, which shows which highways are clogged. I was impressed!

That evening I looked up movie theaters and restaurants and we found an area that had both and headed out. I had the movie showtimes at my fingertips, so while we waited for our food at the restaurant it was easy to find a convenient showing for a movie we both decided to see (we saw the hilarious action spoof Shoot 'em Up which had just come out that day).

By the time we got back to our hotel that night, my iPhone's battery was pretty much exhausted -- just a sliver of red power left on the battery display. Before bed I plugged in my AC adapter and immediately realized something was wrong. Normally when you plug in the power you get a beautiful picture of a battery being charged. This time I had a blank screen. Worse, when I woke up the iPhone, the battery icon did not have a lightning bolt in it, which meant that it wasn't charging.

I figured I was plugged into a bad AC outlet, but every outlet in the room -- even working outlets -- failed to charge the phone. I wasn't sure if the problem was in my USB adapter or the iPod-to-USB cord, so I borrowed my brother's iPod cord and it didn't work either. This seemed to indicate that my AC adapter was bad. Dave hadn't brought his with him and I had only brought the one. So I had to wait until the next day to charge my iPhone in his car (we both had brought car chargers with us). We went off to breakfast on Venice Beach and I (reluctantly) left my iPhone in his car to charge while we walked (so no pictures of that part of my trip, sadly).

Later that morning we ended at a mall where there was an Apple Store. Unfortunately, I hadn't brought the bad adapter with me or I could have exchanged it, so I was going to buy a new one until I saw the $30 price. Yikes! I really didn't want to spend that much for something so simple, especially considering I already had several extra chargers at home (from my various iPods). So I decided to not buy one -- and outside, in the mall, we passed a cell phone stall displaying all sorts of cell phone adapters and chargers. I asked the guy if he had an iPod charger. It took him a few minutes, but he did find one: $20 and it worked great the rest of my trip (I'm still using it).

I did splurge on a battery-pack for iPod at the Apple Store. The Apple people told me it wouldn't work on iPhone, but I thought it worth the change. Worse case I could always use it for my iPods (two AA batteries gives a video iPod two hours of video playing time).

Unfortunately, it seems the Apple sales people were correct: while it plugs into the iPhone just fine and the "charging" display lights up, it seems to drain the phone more than charge it, I'm not sure why. I need to do more tests, but when I tried it while traveling I ended up with less iPhone power instead of more.

Next Time: Marc's trip continues with live blogging via iPhone and adventures in the Mid-West.

macopinion@designwrite.com