Yoyodyne Flash: European phone experience + iPod Touch

hank.harken (apparently) - 07:16am Jan 23, 2008 PST
via email



We've talked here about cell phones and Europe. Here is my experience
from November and December in Europe while on assignment as a
subcontractor for Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems ("Where the Future Begins
Tomorrow").

Caveat Emptor:

I settled on a suggestion from a fellow Tidbits reader to buy an
inexpensive european cell phone from Tiger Direct. It would have been
great except for some problems. I ordered and received an inexpensive LG
phone labeled as "European" on the Tiger Direct website. OK, I received
it and I looked at the documentation and it was in Spanish. OK, I can
work that out but I decided to first see if English language
documentation was on the LG site. Not for that model and I found out it
was manufactured in Columbia. Then my son fell in a swimming pool with
his Motorola phone in his pocket. Out of curiousity, we took the SIM for
his ATT plan and put it in the new LG phone. It worked which was
interesting since european GSM uses different bands. I thought, maybe
this LG is a quad band phone.

Upon arrival in Frankfurt, Germany, I immediately found a helpful
combination phone/call center/Internet shop, purchased an Ortel prepaid
plan with a SIM and popped it into the phone received from Tiger
Direct. Nothing, nichts, nada, zilch. Placed the SIM in one of the
shop's phones and it worked. In short, the phone I received and sold as
a "European" phone from Tiger Direct was not a European phone at all but
a US (or perhaps Western Hemisphere) GSM phone . In the Frankfurt shop I
purchased a decent Motorola phone for 30 Euros roughly equivalent to the
cost of the phone from Tiger Direct. This phone has menus in German. I
should have inquired about a phone with language settings but that issue
didn't occur to me at the time. My travels also brought me to Madrid and
Italy but I didn't purchase additional phone plans or SIMs for those
countries. Not enough time in either place to investigate phone plans
though I did hear about a plan in Spain if anyone is interested in that.

Lesson: buy your "European" phone in Europe. You won't spend any more
and you know it will work.

The pre-paid plan worked great for me. I didn't need a high end phone,
or high end plan or subscription. Your needs may differ.

The iPod Touch:

With my plan to travel light, I decided to forego (past tense,
forwent ?, yes, believe it or not) lugging a laptop through three or
four countries and instead purchased an iPod Touch for the WiFi
capabilities. It worked great - I wouldn't trade it for an oscillation
overthruster. The biggest problem was trying to find open WiFi access
points. The Wi-Fi directories on the web mostly list pay or
subscription access points. I encountered many secured WiFi access
points during the trip. Many thanks to the unknown administrator of the
"default" network on that certain street in Venice, saving me a chunk of
change for overpriced Internet access in that city's Internet shops. As
in the US a lot of the smaller hotels are now including Wi-Fi access at
no additional cost. I had no problem logging into hotels' and hostels'
passworded access points. I hope Apple will include Flash at some point
as at least one airline site used Flash for an interactive map.

Though no substitute for a full physical keyboard, the on-screen keypad/
board was versatile and I had no problem accessing and logging into and
using my home Cox account or or Google mail for web-based mail.
Interestingly, Gmail recognized that a "mobile" device was connected and
formated the screen accordingly. The iPod Touch built-in software which
suggests how a character sequence might be completed was a little
mystifying to me. For example, as I was keying the sequence "documen",
the system suggested "doctors" when I wanted "documents". Similarly, I
keyed "yester" and the system suggested "yeshiva" when I keying
"yesterday". My apologies to anyone in yeshiva circles but I would
expect "yesterday" to occur more often in general use than "yeshiva". Of
course, the suggested completion can be ignored and you can continue
keying to complete the word.

As I travelled I keyed in contact information for the interesting people
I met and I used the Calendar function almost as a journal, recording
where I was, plus hotels, and flight information. Returning home, all
this information was transferred to my iMac G5 Address Book and iCal.

Overall, the Touch is a great device. I'm looking forward to loading the
software update.

Greetings to all from John Bigbooté and John Yaya.

Hank