PDA is pretty damn awful on the road

By COLIN MOORE

The proof of a PDA (personal digital assistant) as a useful travel tool is surely on the road. During a recent visit to Canada I checked out the e-mail and internet access capabilities of my handheld PDA with its Windows CE 2.0 software.

The unit, a Philips Velo 500, has a built-in modem and plugging into the telephone system couldn't be easier. All I had to do was plug one end of an accessory cable into my PDA and the other into the telephone.

Connecting to mains power was not always so easy as often the nearest mains power socket was some distance from the telephone. My internet provider, Telecom's Xtra, does not "support" Windows CE but all that means is that global roaming internet telephone numbers have to be input manually into the PDA and not by using the Xtra software as you can do with your home PC or a laptop running on Windows 98 or 2000.

Before leaving home I opened the iPass (Xtra's global roaming) file on my home PC and found the number for a link to Xtra in Kelowna, the major city in the interior of British Columbia, and chose one of several available for Vancouver.

I installed a remote networking link to Kelowna and another to Vancouver on the remote networking programme on my PDA.

Once in my hotel room, I noted the numbers on the room telephone that I needed to dial to get an outside line and added these to the Kelowna number installed on the PDA.

All I had to do was automatically dial up the connection. Of four attempts, however, only one was successful. It enabled me to check my e-mail and access the net to view the Herald online to see the major news stories back home. The cost of my efforts on my hotel bill was $NZ13.

The Sun Peaks resort is near the city of Kamloops but there is no iPass service for that town. Theoretically, I should have been able to access Kelowna again after adding the area dialling code to the number but the number would not dial.

So I switched to the Vancouver remote connection with the addition of the area code. The call went through to Vancouver successfully on eight occasions but on six of those I was disconnected. Because the call was registered as being answered in Vancouver, I was still charged a fee by the hotel.

On the two occasions I was authenticated as the correct user, I was essentially making a long-distance call and as I searched the Herald website for Super 12 results, it proved a costly $64.67.

I had the same experience at Whistler, where I managed two successful calls out of six at a total cost of $36.

The worst experience was in Vancouver where at least the access number was now a local number. I dialled the iPass number 28 times at $1.56 a call and managed to connect only twice. It cost $43.75.

The glitch appeared to be in authenticating my user name and password, as though the local provider was having difficulty talking to the Xtra server in New Zealand.

Successful connections happened quite quickly. If there was any delay I got to know that the connection would not succeed.

The most likely reason is that the modem on my PDA is not robust enough and that the Pocket Internet Explorer program and e-mail service in Pocket Outlook on Windows CE 2.0 tends to be flaky. (Windows CE 2.0 has been superseded by Windows CE 3.0).

Had I been using a quality laptop with Windows 98 or 2000 software I may have had fewer problems, although I would have had to cart around a laptop for occasional e-mail access.

However, even with a laptop I would still have had the cost of long-distance calls.