IP Democracy: The iPhone is the Traveler's Best Friend

As my devoted readers will notice, I haven’t blogged in a week — the last blogging break of a summer filled with five blogging interruptus trips. I’ve been on a planes-trains-automobiles-subways-riverboats tour of the midwest starting in Chicago and ending in Detroit.

Travel is a nightmare for people whose livelihoods depend on the Internet. Even with mobile Internet connectivity through, say, Verizon Wireless’ EV-DO network, gaining access to a solid Internet connection is an exercise in severe frustration, particularly if you’re on the go. It’s not practical to haul a laptop everywhere and even if it were, firing up the thing takes forever and even with mobile wireless broadband service, connections are extremely slow.

Forget hotel Wi-Fi networks. With five hundred rooms sharing a single 3 Mbps connection, I was lucky to get speeds that top dial-up levels.

But the iPhone…how did I travel without it? It’s easy to carry, of course, and although the AT&T Edge Network leaves a lot to be desired, it does work, more or less, particularly in the midwest, where the carrier must have excellent facilities. The whole of the Internet was at my fingertips, not just the bits and pieces rendered for mobile viewing by only a handful of top websites.

Need to browse the New York Times? I stayed as up-to-date as I needed to be by scanning the newspaper of record in user-friendly, true Internet fashion. Need to check email? The iPhone is a snap for most users, although I have issues with spam filters that make it difficult for me to use my POP email accounts with the iPhone. But I use gmail as a corporate email back-up system and it’s a breeze to check gmail on the iPhone.

I navigated Chicago’s streets, booked tickets for a Second City performance, checked out Techmeme, conducted dozens of Google searches and idly watched YouTube videos while walking, riding, waiting and just hanging out. And of course I made dozens of phone calls with the iPhone.

I could have done many (but not all) of these things on the Blackberry, just not quite as easily and certainly not as freely because the iPhone entails no data charges. I even settled a bet (which I lost) about when the film “The Deer Hunter” was released while sitting in a Greek restaurant in Ann Arbor by whipping out the iPhone.

The one thing I couldn’t do was serious computer-required work, such as blogging, writing or researching. Those things still require a laptop and a better-than-Edge network. But still, based on this last trip, it seems to me the iPhone is a (domestic) traveler’s best friend, particularly in areas where AT&T’s networks are up to snuff.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on August 22, 2007 11:02 AM to IP Democracy