One of the things that made my trip to India and England so successful was seamless wireless connectivity. I thought I’d go into some detail about this, because it might be useful for future travellers.
As I’ve described before, my phone is a Palm Treo 650 *, with service from Cingular. It’s a quad-band GSM phone, and supports GPRS (IP over PPP) Internet access. (This is critical: if you plan to travel to most parts of the world, you must get a GSM phone. It’s the standard; just get over it.) The Treo includes a basic but adequate email client called Versamail, which can handle POP, IMAP, and SMTP with and without SSL. This means that I can access both my Sun email (Edgemail via secure IMAP) and my personal ISP account (via POP). There’s also a web browser called Blazer which does a reasonable job of rendering complex web sites on the 320×320 screen. And since it’s a PalmOS device it also supports a wide range of applications; the one that I used most often was World Clock, without which it would have been really hard to keep track of the 101/2 hour time difference between Boston and Bangalore. (I also installed Bejeweled 2 as a superior time-waster to solitaire.)
As I noted earlier, I called Cingular to enable international roaming before leaving the US. Everywhere I went – in India and in the UK – I established a usable roaming connection when I turned on the phone. However the automatic choice was not always the best one. Several of the providers didn’t support GPRS (or didn’t allow GPRS roaming), which meant that I couldn’t get my email. After manually selecting each of the available providers, I eventually determined that the best choices were Airtel in India and Orange in the UK.
Looking back on this trip, I cannot emphasize too strongly how important it was to have a working cellphone (with web and email) while travelling in India. It’s not cheap, but roaming calls back to the US and UK were certainly less expensive than hotel phone rates. The normal way of getting around in India is to book a driver and car for the day; your driver will expect you to contact him by cell phone whenever you need him. When the power goes out (rarely, but inevitably), or when that WiFi hotspot turns out to require the use of a prepaid coupon that can only be purchased somewhere else, you can still use email. And most important, the successful resolution of my Mumbai connection situation depended heavily on the use of voice, email, and web; first in Bangalore airport, then on the shuttle bus to Mumbai’s international terminal, and finally as I stalked the corridors of Mumbai airport at 3am.
One final thought. I packed my iSight camera in the hope of using iChatAV to videoconference with friends and family rather than using the phone. Well, it didn’t work out. The main reason was that most of the hotels used firewalls that blocked several of the TCP ports needed by iChatAV. Maybe a simple VoIP system would have been better….
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*One point worth noting is that the Treo 650 includes a camera, albeit a fairly basic one. Photography is forbidden in many places in India, and you will frequently be required to check any cameras or camera-equipped phones. If I were buying now, I’d be tempted by the Siemens SX66, which doesn’t have a camera but does include WiFi – and it’s only 2.1 ounces!