Traveling with the Pocket PC Phone and GPRS Internet Access
I have had the T-Mobile (XDA) Pocket PC Phone for several months now, and just recently added Internet access and had the opportunity to travel with it. In general, I am impressed...
The good parts: EMail access was entirely reasonable, and using AIM or MSN was not only possible, but fun. I have IM'ed and emailed in places as diverse as a bus heading out of the Space Needle to a plane waiting for the weather to clear in Newark. I had the advantage of traveling to Seattle, and T-Mobile's network is amazing out there. Of course, 12 miles from home at my mother-in-laws, there is a total dead zone...
Possible hitches? PDA friendly Web sites are few and far between, and an awful lot of them seem to just not work very well. I was looking for the name of a CD, and while I had the address of the Amazon mobile site (thanks to PDA Portal) it just did not come up. I eventually went to Circuit City's regular site (with images turned off) and was able to pick through the site.
Using this device to try and surf the Web has increased my understanding of the issues with accessibility. If sites did not provide alternate text for images, with Images turned off, it was almost impossible to navigate the site. Also, some sites even with alternate text on images were just munged, likely because they did not include height and width of images (though I will be doing some more research on this to make sure that was the problem).
Forget about doing normal kinds of Remote access. GoToMyPC has a new PDA version, but it is impossible to use, in my experience. Fellow blogger G. Andrew Duthie has had some success using the Terminal Services client, but for me, I think I will just hunt out an Internet cafe if need be and use GoToMyPC from there...
Next on my agenda: Working to create some neat PDA friendly content, and then convice someone to pay me to do more...