Four months with the X60s and I’m falling deeper in love with the Verizon EVDO service that comes bundled with the ultra-portable.
I write this on the 5:50 am Accela out of Providence. I commuted to NYC post-9/11 on the Accela and always rued the lack of access, wondering why some smart person didn’t figure out a way to offer Wi-Fi for a fee. Last week’s news that Boeing was dropping its airborne Connexion service (which I had one chance to try in July on SAS, but declined because the bandits wanted $20 for the privilege) is proof that no one has cracked the code for providing rolling connectivity.
In 1995, when Forbes.com officially launched, a press event on the Forbes yacht the Highlander was planned, replete with tons of demo machines running the website so the press could play around with it. I spent over a month looking for a way to get live data onboard, but alas, there was nothing short of a military satellite system that would have set the company back $100,000. So we ran the site on local caches.
It’s nice to be able to keep up a running IM conversation with a colleague, catch up on my Bloglines reading, run my usual Blogistan filters for Lenovo+Thinkpad, work on a big presentation for the week after next. My book (David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) is going untouched. The newspaper is unneeded. And even the normally awesome coastal scenery is going ignored.
My colleague, Glen Gilbert, says always-on connectivity is a good-thing/bad-thing. I put it in the mostly good-category.
So, NYC today, RTP tonight, Washington on Wed. or Thursday — back to Cape Thursday night.
I saw a guy on BART subway this morning with an X60, surfing the Internet using a branded Sprint card. I got a seat before we went into (San Francisco) transbay tube, so I couldn’t tell if it works under water….
Hmmm. Good question. Some wireless providers put extenders into tunnels, but BART is a big tunnel.
I recently used my sprint mobile broadband card at an airport to negotiate my way into a better hotel when USAIR tried to put me up at a fleabag motel after a flight cancellation. I pulled up recent complaints about the hotel and showed it to the customer service supervisor. Then, when she offered me a comfort inn room instead, i found a comparable priced room at Courtyard Marriott (with those great new beds) and convinced her to put me there!
EvDo works in Walla Walla WA, surprising me a lot.
jimf