Jewish World Review Feb. 7, 2003 / 5 Adar I 5763
By Mark Kellner
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
In case you were wondering, 3,000 miles - my driving distance (including
stops and detours) from Los Angeles to a new residence in Montgomery County,
Maryland - is a lot of driving to accomplish in a little more than five
days. Especially when you're racing a moving truck to make sure that you're
there before the driver arrives.
This mini-adventure last week, my third trans-continental moving/driving
trip (one leg was by air), was a lot more fun this time, thanks to several
bits of technology. There were also some frustrations.
AOL EVERYWHERE? It's fun to pile on AOL Time Warner, these days, but one of
the things I have long admired about AOL, or America Online as it once was
known, was the ability to at least dial into the network from just about
anywhere on earth. I've logged on from Nairobi, Kenya and Cheju Island,
South Korea. More mundane places such as Santa Rosa, NM and Ft. Smith, AR
provide a different experience, however.
In both places, logging on to AOL was, well, impossible. I can understand
this for tiny Santa Rosa, a town of under 2,800 people. But Ft. Smith, a
city of over 80,000, with a metropolitan area large enough to merit its own
Arbitron radio station ratings, apparently doesn't have an AOL dialup number
this traveler could use.
AOL is still a great service for travelers, overall, but a little attention
should be paid to smaller and growing markets as well.
AT&T WIRE-LESS. That hyphen is not a typo. Driving across much of I-40, in
places like Arkansas, Tennessee, even a good chunk of western Virginia, my
AT&T Wireless GSM phone was wire-less. There was no coverage. A PCS phone
from Sprint fared much better, but the overall experience was frustrating,
and would have been even more so had I only one device on which to rely.
It's reasonable to expect this issue will diminish as GSM systems
proliferate, but it would be to the advantage of AT&T - let alone GSM peers
such as T-Mobile and Cingular Wireless - to step up the GSM deployment, and
pronto.
When it works, the GSM service is as good as anything out there - and you
have the ability to use your phone on international travels. But during
those vast stretches of nothingness, it's rather frustrating.
WIRELESS HEADSET: Anycom, a firm in Irvine, California, has come up with a
wireless Bluetooth headset that works with the AT&T-based phone I was
carrying, the Sony Ericssson T68i. No cords, no wires run between headset
and phone, yet sound quality is clear and good for the listener (me) and,
callers told me, pretty good for them, if with a slight echo. At $80, it's a
neat little product (details at www.anycom.com) that has great potential.
One potential improvement: the ear holder is a bit uncomfortable if the
device is worn for very long stretches of time.
Bluetooth technology, however, holds great promise in this regard: cutting
the cord is very helpful, especially in the small confines of a car.
THANK HEAVEN FOR XM. I've sung the praises of Washington, DC-based XM
Satellite Radio before, and I'll do it again now. Having the service in the
car was invaluable, first as a way to avoid the blandness of local radio and
second to keep up with the news and weather as we went across.
Because of another device in the car, of which more later, I had to used a
small, low-power FM transmitter to send the audio from the XM receiver to
the car stereo. It worked well, with a slight learning curve, and resulted
in our being able to follow the news of the past seven days - sadly,
including the Columbia story - without hassle. For those traveling regularly
over long distances, a satellite radio service is a must. That's probably
why truckers at the Petro Truck Plaza in West Memphis, AR, were clustered
around a table where XM was being sold.
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JWR contributor Mark Kellner has reported on technology for industry newspapers and magazines since 1983, and has been the computer columnist for The Washington Times since 1991.Comment by clicking here.
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