Macopinion

Laptopless Traveling, Part 3

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

[Earlier, Marc wrote about deciding to take week-long a cross-country trip with only his iPhone. Today his trip continues from Los Angeles to the Mid-West and New York City.]

Sunday evening was the soccer game we'd come to watch, and it was a great match. Our Houston Dynamos (formerly the San Jose Earthquakes) demolished the LA Galaxy 3-1. We were seated in an area full of San Jose fans, which was great.

Best of all, I used my iPhone to take photos of the game and immediately emailed them to my Flickr account. These automatically (within seconds) showed up on my soccer blog! I also logged into my Twitter account in Safari and typed out a few updates about the game so soccer fans following my journey had live updates!

Later that evening I made a phone call to GCast, a service I'd signed up with before leaving home. There I recorded a five minute audio blog about the game and my trip, and GCast automatically generated a podcast which people could listen to on my website.

This was totally cool. Here I was, on the road, with no laptop, and updating my blog with photos, text, and audio! And it was nearly real-time updating, too. This is the future, folks!

After LA, I flew to Kansas City and rented a car and drove to Springfield, Missouri, where my relatives live. (Though Springfield's the main entry point to get to nearby Branson, it's a smaller airport and expensive to fly there.) It was about a three hour drive and I was delighted to find the car was equipped with Sirius satellite radio -- and it was already tuned to the soccer channel! So I listened to a couple of the weekend's English Premiere League matches I'd missed and even made a quick GCast call to update my podcast listeners with my progress. Pretty cool!

I spent a few days in Springfield, and it was really nice. I stayed with my great-uncle (my grandfather's brother) and his wife. They have a house on the outskirts of town that he hand-built like 50 years ago. They used to be really in the boonies, but now the town is encroaching. They still have tons of wildlife, however: I saw deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, snakes, and a zillion birds. It was pretty cool.

Unfortunately, while Uncle Lloyd has broadband, he doesn't have WiFi, so I had to use Edge for my iPhone's data connection. And here I discovered the problem with living in the boonies. Oddly, the cellular connection was inconsistent. Sometimes I had full bars in the house. Most of the time it would drop to two or even none, and Edge was useless. Just a simple text page in Safari would take minutes to display. I'd go outside on the back deck and sometimes the bars would return. Other times it was poor out there as well. The quality of the connection seemed utterly random. We had good weather while I was there, so I don't think that was a factor. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the network was saturated. Perhaps I was at the edge of the cellular network and if even a few others were using the connection first, there wouldn't be bandwidth for me?

Since this wasn't a working vacation, the Edge inconsistencies weren't really a problem, just an annoyance. I'd sit down to check my email or read some web pages and find I had no Internet access. Or the Internet access was glacial, which was almost worse. Ten minutes to display a text page? That's worse than 300-baud dial-up!

But at other times the connection was fine (twenty to thirty seconds for that same text page). It was very odd and would have been a problem if I'd had serious work to do. (I was almost tempted to run out and buy a wireless router for my uncle, but resisted the urge as it would complicate his network and he'd have trouble fixing it if something went wrong after I left.)

While in Springfield, I corresponded with my cousins in New York. One lives in Brooklyn, the other near Spanish Harlem. The latter cousin has an iPhone work bought for him. With both I corresponded via email and text messaging and voice calls (voice calls to the iPhone cousin being free as we're on the same AT&T network). I made final arrangements for my arrival in New York.

Phil, my iPhone cousin, thought he'd be able pick me up at JFK, though it wasn't finalized. Of course I had no phone coverage while in the air, so I didn't get his confirmation until after I landed (at midnight). Then we talked on the phone until we saw each other -- pretty cool for finding people!

Next Time: Marc uses the iPhone to find his way around New York City.

macopinion@designwrite.com