I like to be mobile. I have office space in the house but when you work at home, you get tired, eventually, of working at home. I try to make it out every day and work someplace else, but connectivity has always been an issue.
Simply put, I need to be able to:
- Place and receive phone calls
- Send and receive e-mail
- Surf the Internet
Number one is trivial today. Number two is becoming trivial. Number three has been there as well, but is generally pricey.
For example, to have 3G wireless capability with Verizon, Sprint or Cingular is an $80 /month expenditure (plus equipment costs), unless you happen to have a cell plan with them. That drops it to $60/month. T-Mobile, my carrier, does not currently have a 3G network, but they now have the spectrum needed to launch one and have announced plans to build it. We like T-Mobile because they have good deals on minutes compared to the other providers. Their recently announced My Faves program is a great one to save minutes. Upshot: we are happy with the cell plan of T-Mobile but less than satisifed with their high speed wireless network.
Hot Spots
Well I have been a T-Mobile Hot Spot subscriber for three years. This gives me high-speed (T1 speeds) at Starbucks and other hot-spot locations (Borders, some airports, etc.). That's fine except if I go to the university library, where I am a guest and have no rights whatsoever to a university network. I've been happy with the Hot Spot service because it does give me the ability to stay connected in certain locations. And $20 /month (cost with a cell plan) has been worth it to me. Their other Internet plans have largely been unacceptable to me. Their EDGE network would give me the connectivity I needed but the cost was too much - $50, if memory serves. That's too much for a 2.5G network. Essentially, it requires an Ericson card that goes into the laptop (which also costs some bucks) and it has another SIM card, so it's like having another phone. The other option entailed moving the SIM card between the phone and the EDGE card. That's unacceptable, because I lose my voice connectivity to have Internet connectivity.
Enter the Dash
Things recently changed for me. I resigned with T-Mobile and got the Dash phone, which is a competitor to the "Q." It's a Smart Phone, which means it synchs to Outlook but has limited features compared to a Pocket PC (translate: you can't edit Office docs, though you can view them). Smart Phones are considered lame data entry devices (they are) so that apparently is why Microsoft made a smart phone edition of Windows Mobile that lets you view things but not edit them. Well the Dash does have a keyboard (QWERTY) which isn't bad. However, it's a far cry from a real one and using it should be done sparingly.
The real prize here is the Dash can double as a USB modem so it gives me the connectivity I need on T-Mobile's EDGE network and for only $10 more per month ($30 total for T-Mobile's "Total Internet" package). Now I can have my cake and eat it too. I believe I can even receive voice calls while using the modem, though I have not yet tried this. I was pleasantly surprised that EDGE speeds aren't that bad. Not blazingly fast at all, but acceptable for light surfing, which is really all I need to do. For email, it's perfect.
The DASH is quite a nice phone too. I've been really happy with it in the five days I've owned it. I like having all my contacts in the phone. It's the cat's pajamas. I like being able to check and reply to email. And the surfing experience is acceptable, especially if all I need is to check movie times or the weather and surf reports. The DASH also has Wi-Fi support and it's quite capable in this regard. So at home, at a hot-spot or an open wi-fi network, I have better speeds than the folks with Verizon, Sprint or Cingular.
Will I upgrade to their 3G plan when it comes out? Probably, but I'll have to get the early reports, review the pricing and then decide. The DASH is not a 3G phone so I'm not sure how that will play out.
But I'm finally happy that connectivity point one, two and three are satisified.