Surfing and mail on the go

By PETER GRIFFIN

The legion of geeks sporting mobile gadgets that let them visit websites, fire off emails and take digital pictures on the move has taken a lot of undeserved flak over the past couple of years.

They have, after all, been paving the way for you to join the mobile computing revolution - ironing out the software kinks, blowing their money on devices that don't really do much, learning from their mistakes.

It's got to the stage where mobile devices could be reasonably useful for the rest of us. The prerequisites are still the same, though. You'll need a stack of cash, a head for acronyms and the patience of a garden snail.

Choosing the right gadgets

If you are like most New Zealanders you probably access the internet from your home computer over a dial-up connection and carry a mobile phone around for talking to your mates and sending SMS text messages.

Mobile phone and computer manufacturers are trying to change that. They want you to have the ability to do all of the above and more on a mobile device - and pay well for the convenience.

Some have squeezed computing elements into a mobile handset, and others have brought the phone to the PDA (personal digital assistant).

Most new handsets hitting the market offer Wap (wireless access protocol) for web browsing and email as standard.

Sony Ericsson's T68 and Nokia's new 7650 are two top-end models offering email and multimedia messaging.

But with a pokey mobile keyboard, the emailing experience ends up being no better than sending a text message. Most Wap phones will allow you to send an email using an address assigned by the operator. Both Vodafone and Telecom offer Wap-based email, news and entertainment services.

A better option is to connect your phone to a PDA. Telecom's Kyocera QCP3035 and Palm V is a relatively versatile combination. A data cable links the phone and PDA, allowing web surfing and emailing.

Vodafone offers a range of handsets to work with devices such as the Hewlett Packard iPaq, running over the GPRS (general packet radio system) network for data.

Most PDAs allow a cheaper alternative for catching up with the news. Connect the PDA to your desktop computer and download the day's news to it using your regular internet account, allowing you to browse the information off-line, but on the move. There are a number of these kinds of services on the web, AvantGo being the most popular.

Then there are the two-in-ones. Like Handspring's Treo, which is based on the Palm operating system and combines a PDA, miniature keyboard and a phone ($1799).

There is also the Kyocera 6035, a slightly clunkier model than the Treo.

Another example is Nokia's pricey 9210 Communicator. It lets you type up documents and spreadsheets, send faxes, emails and SMS messages, play video clips and surf the web via a nice colour screen. Its main drawback is that connecting to Vodafone's GSM network, you are charged by the minute for accessing the web, missing out on the advantages of the faster and cheaper GPRS network.

Settling on a network

Both Telecom and Vodafone, the country's two mobile network operators, have a range of offerings in the mobile data space and it's a hard call to say which one does it better.

Most experts say the CDMA network is better for data. But when you weigh up pricing, customer service and merit of the differing devices supported by the operators the best choice is not clear.

Both the CDMA and GPRS networks are packet-based, so you are always connected to the network and will be charged for data use by quantity rather than time connected.

The pricing plans for data are similar. The choice really comes down to what make and model phone catches your eye (the network operators support differing brands), whether you want to retain your old mobile number or are happy jumping networks to a new one, and whether you plan to use your phone overseas.

Bits and bytes, dollars and cents

So is the mobile internet expensive? That depends on how much surfing, downloading and emailing you do.

It may be that you're happy shelling out for a flat-rate, all-you-can-eat, dial-up internet access, safe in the knowledge that you're unlikely ever to pay more than $30 a month.

Using data services over the mobile networks is a different story where "flat rate" is an unfamiliar term.

In general, you will be billed for every "byte" (or tiny piece of data) you send or receive on the move. For example, opening Xtra's homepage on a Palm V over the CDMA network uses about 35kb of data. Therefore, the costs would be around 28c with Telecom's casual use account. Where these mobile computing set-ups come into their own is with sending and receiving emails.

Keep it simple

Plain text emails are generally just a few kilobytes in size and therefore cheap to send from a mobile.

Picking up the news from a site specially formatted for the small screen of the iPaq or Palm, such as www.abc.com, will use around 200kb of data. Under Telecom's entry level, casual-use price plan (4c per 5kb) that would cost you $1.60. With Vodafone - $2.

For more constant users Telecom recommends its Mobile Data 12 account, which includes 12Mb of data traffic a month for $25. Extra traffic is charged at a rate of 2.5c per 5kb. In the Vodafone camp a similar deal "Everyday Data 15" will cost $30 a month for 15Mb of traffic with additional traffic charged at 4c per 10kb of data.

So over the space of a month it's going to be expensive and the lure of the web, always close at hand for boring commuting trips, can be dangerous. Remember, whether you pay by the minute or the byte, the meter is running - whenever you open a fresh page.

Losing your voice

There's an alternative for those who don't fancy the idea of fusing their telephone and computer into one - something for the separatists, so to speak. How about a credit-card-sized modem with a wiggly little aerial that slots into your laptop and allows you reasonably fast internet access from anywhere you can pick up mobile network coverage?

Hang on to your cheap GSM mobile and use it for what it does best - making phone calls - leaving internet and email use to the computer, with the freedom of a full-sized, full-colour screen and a keyboard that lets you use more than your thumbs.

It's early days for this type of technology but the potential is great. Telecom for some time has been selling PCMCIA wireless cards that connect to its CDMA network at a speed of 14.4kbps, frustratingly slow for anything other than sending emails in reality. The Herald, however, managed to get hold of a wireless card that runs on the higher-speed CDMA1X network that Telecom launched last month.

That allows web-surfing at a maximum speed of 153kbps or more than twice as fast as a regular dial-up internet connection. Plugged into a Dell Latitude laptop the GTRAN DotSurfer wireless card worked nicely. Installing the card and setting up the software took about 20 minutes. Getting a network connection was fast, like hooking into Telecom's high-speed Jetstream service.

Putting it on the card

We were able to test how long it took to receive a 1Mb file through the speed testing software available at Jetstream Games. On average, data speeds hovered around 74kbps, dropping as low as 50kbps and bursting up to 120kbps - more than enough for a comfortable web-surfing experience.

The card worked fine all over Auckland, even in the car on the move.

The bundled GT Dialer software lets you tap out SMS messages on your full-sized laptop keyboard and send them relatively cheaply.

Such cards are also available as attachments to PDAs, allowing even greater mobility. Still all this convenience doesn't come cheap. The GTRAN wireless cards that Telecom is supporting sell for $1149 plus GST - that's on top of the price of the laptop (around $3000 for a mid-range model) or PDA ($700 to $1600) that you have to take into consideration.

Then there's the data charges. In a half-hour web-surfing session using the GTran card total data traffic was 3.3MB. The way Telecom's account packages are set up you could easily blow a quarter of your monthly data allowance in one spell of surfing.

Vodafone

Telecom

AvantGo

abc.com

Jetstream Games

GTran