KEY POINTS:
Travelling in this electronic age is all very nice - it's now easy to communicate with the folks back home, send them photos, catch up on news in New Zealand, listen to your favourite music and get the latest information about places you plan to visit. But there is a downside.
For one thing, by the time you've stuffed a digital camera, laptop computer, MP3 player and mobile phone in your bag - plus the assorted leads, chargers and adapters - travelling light goes out the window.
For another, all this electronic connectivity depends on service providers in different countries and, as I know to my cost, many other places use incompatible mobile phone systems. The coverage you get also depends on who your phone company has signed up with, not every hotel has broadband and it's not always easy to find an internet cafe or to locate a WiFi hot spot.
So I was happy to use a trip to South Korea to trial an Okta Mondo WorldMode roaming mobile phone - able to switch between CDMA and GSM networks - which includes a 1.3 megapixel camera, MP3 player and tape recorder. It can text, phone, hook up to the web and send emails and has useful accessories like an alarm clock, diary and calculator.
Best of all, according to Telecom, it would operate in 140 countries, including "all the major places New Zealanders go to".
Installing a few tunes to listen to during the long flight to Seoul proved more complicated than I'd expected. First, the phone didn't want to communicate with my PC and it took the intervention of a technician to discover that it didn't like the USB port I normally use.
Then I found that it didn't recognise music from my CDs. Eventually, I managed to download a Radio NZ podcast of a Beethoven symphony, but when I tried to add the podcast of a Mozart string quartet, the phone told me it had run out of memory. Not much music on the flight, then.
Still, when I arrived in Seoul the Mondo immediately connected to a local network, which was more than could be said for my Vodafone mobile. Calling home was easy and sending text messages was fairly straightforward - apart from the phone's refusal to send replies.
I didn't need to switch to a GSM network, but that's clearly a useful option, especially if you are travelling somewhere like the US or Canada.
Unfortunately, when I crossed the border into North Korea I wasn't allowed to take a mobile, so I never found out if it would have worked there, and on my other destination, JeJu Island, there was no reception - though according to Telecom there should have been.
My biggest disappointment was that, because I hadn't read the fine print, I didn't know the phone doesn't have data roaming.
As a result, I couldn't carry out plans to check the latest Super 14 results (which had been easy enough back home via the mobile-friendly www.xtra.co.nz/pda) or email a couple of photos to my wife.
Telecom says its BlackBerry 8830, due to launch shortly, will have data roaming in around 75 countries, so I was a bit ahead of the times.
Taken overall, the Okta Mondo is a big step forward from my standard mobile, especially in its ability to link to CDMA and GSM networks (except those in South America, which have a different frequency).
But my experience suggests that the perfect electronic companion for the global traveller has yet to arrive. For the time being, I'll have to continue lugging round piles of electronic paraphernalia to perform all the different functions I want.
* Telecom is offering a chance for one lucky Herald Travel reader to own an Okta Mondo (worth $399). If you'd like to be in to win, just put your name, address and daytime phone number on the back of an envelope, jot down the number of countries the Okta Mondo works in, and post to: Okta Mondo Competition, Travel Section, NZ Herald, PO Box 3290, Auckland. Entries must reach the Herald by noon on May 20 and the winner will be announced in Travel on May 27.
