Working Anywhere

PC Magazine on The Nokia NSeries 800

Overall a very nice review in PCMag.com about a very nice product, the Nokia Nseries N800 that keeps getting more and more addictive the more I use it.

WiFi On Trains Hitting The Brakes?

WiFi NetNews has a nice summary of the state of WiFi on the rails.

In my view railway based WiFi is a great way to preserve the environment. As someone who regularly has taken the train from San Diego to Santa Barbara or L.A. or into SF from Sacramento having an EvDO connection has been a blessing, but with real T1 speeds that WiFi offers the idea of Working Anywhere is the real deal.

It's time for the USA Dept. of Transportation to kick up some dollars and make the rails in heavily congested markets WiFi enabled.

Grand Central and Gizmo In Sync

Matt Miller, Paul Kapustka, Alec Saunders, Garrett Smith and Ken Camp are all providing incredible analysis on the interoperability between GrandCentral and GizmoProject.

Last night Craig Walker, CEO of GrandCentral was my first call to try it out. A few minutes earlier, Dameon (PhoneBoy) and I had just completed a Gizmo to Gizmo call on my Nokia N800 Internet Tablet.

This combination is killer for those of us who travel and have wired broadband in the hotel. Bring along a WiFi travel router, plug that into the hotel's broadband network ad use a N80-Internet Edition dual mode phone from Nokia and the calls are free as you'll avoid cellular carrier airtime. Or if you have one, try Gizmo on a Nokia Internet Tablet 770 or Nseries 800. Then again, you can always use Gizmo and GrandCentral on your Mac or PC too.

With eTel coming up next week, it's nice to see the mashups already becoming a reality, and in this case, one that really works well.

Congrats to all involved in making vision become reality.

Sprint Is Getting It Right

As many readers know Martin Geddes and I both have had our share of issues with T-Mobile on different sides of the Atlantic, so it's somewhat ironic that the exact opposite type of customer service experience occurred with his former employers, Sprint in my life.

Over the past few months I've flown through airports in Milwaukee and Oakland and found it impossible to log on to Sprint's WiFi service using my Macintosh MacBook via either roaming service I have access to, Boingo and AT&T/Cingular. In essence there was an authentication issue caused by some software that needed to be updated, but calls to Sprint or the roaming partners support desk originally yielded a reply that I needed to log on using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, not one of the browsers that works on the MacBook, since Microsoft stopped supporting, or even having IE available for the Intel line of Mac laptops. Given I only was flying through Oakland now and then when I first detected the problem I simply reported it to Boingo who in turn passed it on to Sprint. But as my frequency of travel in and out of Oakland increased it became apparent that despite the original report, some months back, the problem persisted.

Undaunted, and being the journalist that I am, I took my concerns to the PR team at Sprint and have seen nothing but the utmost professionalism by their folks, and by the product manager who runs the WiFi project. They sincerely took my concerns to heart and within a few days actually got back to me with a status report and informed my of the steps that are being taken to assure me that Mac users will be able to roam and log on to their WiFi their networks. This is exactly the PR and Consumer Relations should be handled. Granted it took a call to the PR team, but nonetheless when I compare the reaction that Martin and I have receive from T-Mobile after saying "I'm media"--they say they can't talk to you if you are going to report the way things are handled, or record the call, one has to realize that Sprint is really getting things right.

Going one step farther, as an early adopter and paying customer of Sprint's EVDO-Rev. A mobile broadband, when I reported some dead spots at the Oakland Airport Sprint sent their team out to check, and low and behold, called me back to thank me, and confirmed that the access in some parts of the airport that I reported as slow or non-existant were indeed as reported (dropping down to 1xRTT not EvDO or Rev A.) and confirmed that they had been brought back to where they should be and that speeds are now back to normal.

This is not only the right way of doing things, it's the only way of doing things in the digital age with users who need to have working right all the time.

As a consumer, as media, as road warrior, like many others I decide to pay for things that allow me to be connected when I need to be. To run into issues that don't need to be there, and which often times get placed into a maze of corporate finger pointing frustrates the best of us. In this case the PR team and Product Management team at Sprint made sure that didn't happen and took all the right steps to make sure the consumer/user issues were not only addressed, but corrected when in other organizations the situation would have yielded with the buck being passed elsewhere (i.e. the authentication server supplier or the roaming providers.)

I'm elated that Sprint has this kind of respect for the consumer, and the media. To the team there that has "the right stuff," I applaud you.

Sprint Is Getting It Right

As many readers know Martin Geddes and I both have had our share of issues with T-Mobile on different sides of the Atlantic, so it's somewhat ironic that the exact opposite type of customer service experience occurred with his former employers, Sprint in my life.

Over the past few months I've flown through airports in Milwaukee and Oakland and found it impossible to log on to Sprint's WiFi service using my Macintosh MacBook via either roaming service I have access to, Boingo and AT&T/Cingular. In essence there was an authentication issue caused by some software that needed to be updated, but calls to Sprint or the roaming partners support desk originally yielded a reply that I needed to log on using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, not one of the browsers that works on the MacBook, since Microsoft stopped supporting, or even having IE available for the Intel line of Mac laptops. Given I only was flying through Oakland now and then when I first detected the problem I simply reported it to Boingo who in turn passed it on to Sprint. But as my frequency of travel in and out of Oakland increased it became apparent that despite the original report, some months back, the problem persisted.

Undaunted, and being the journalist that I am, I took my concerns to the PR team at Sprint and have seen nothing but the utmost professionalism by their folks, and by the product manager who runs the WiFi project. They sincerely took my concerns to heart and within a few days actually got back to me with a status report and informed my of the steps that are being taken to assure me that Mac users will be able to roam and log on to their WiFi their networks. This is exactly the PR and Consumer Relations should be handled. Granted it took a call to the PR team, but nonetheless when I compare the reaction that Martin and I have receive from T-Mobile after saying "I'm media"--they say they can't talk to you if you are going to report the way things are handled, or record the call, one has to realize that Sprint is really getting things right.

Going one step farther, as an early adopter and paying customer of Sprint's EVDO-Rev. A mobile broadband, when I reported some dead spots at the Oakland Airport Sprint sent their team out to check, and low and behold, called me back to thank me, and confirmed that the access in some parts of the airport that I reported as slow or non-existant were indeed as reported (dropping down to 1xRTT not EvDO or Rev A.) and confirmed that they had been brought back to where they should be and that speeds are now back to normal.

This is not only the right way of doing things, it's the only way of doing things in the digital age with users who need to have working right all the time.

As a consumer, as media, as road warrior, like many others I decide to pay for things that allow me to be connected when I need to be. To run into issues that don't need to be there, and which often times get placed into a maze of corporate finger pointing frustrates the best of us. In this case the PR team and Product Management team at Sprint made sure that didn't happen and took all the right steps to make sure the consumer/user issues were not only addressed, but corrected when in other organizations the situation would have yielded with the buck being passed elsewhere (i.e. the authentication server supplier or the roaming providers.)

I'm elated that Sprint has this kind of respect for the consumer, and the media. To the team there that has "the right stuff," I applaud you.

How To Do More On Your Treo

Pal Mark Orchant, ZDNet's Office Evolution Blog, is featured on another pal, David Spark's Sprint podcast, the Communications Insider.

It's a 25 minute podcast that tells you things you never knew that help make your Treo even better.

GETTING IT ON...BANG A GONG FOR DEVICESCAPE

One of the companies at DEMO that really rang my bell was DeviceScape out of San Bruno, CA.

While some are panning what they have to offer, by pointing out the shortlist of devices it runs on, I see nothing but good in what they are doing. In simple terms they make getting on a WiFi network as easy as finding someone to hook up with on Craigslist. Their software makes it easy to get onto free or paid WiFi networks because it learns how to from one user, and shares it with all DeviceScape users.

While their debut was at DEMO I've been using it on my Nokia Tablet 770 for sometime and really like it. I like it so much that I was slightly disappointed when their software didn't run yet on the new Nokia Nseries 800 Internet Tablet that just came out in January, but the DeviceScape folks tell me that's coming soon.

For VoIP users they have the thin client working on the Linksys WIP 300 VoIP Phone but as Om pointed out, and as I suggested to their team they need a lot more and soon.

But beyond the short list of devices offered today, the one thing that DeviceScape does is eliminate software bloat to hook up, and get on a wireless network that exists today. This means people (like me) who have to latch on to paid networks can have one client manage all that. That is after they COME OUT WITH A MAC CLIENT!!!!!

Being the optimist, I'm rooting for this company to take their recent third round funding and apply it to two things...getting the software onto more devices and to get more users using the software on those new devices.

WiFi maven Glenn Fleishman has thoughts on this also.