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AnchorDesk

Patrick Houston
How Bluetooth cut my commute time in half

Patrick Houston
Editorial Director, AnchorDesk
Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2003
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I disdain my daily commute, maybe even more than most. Perhaps it comes from growing up in a small town, where people measured their trip to the mill or the mine in minutes. Whatever it is, I want to get to work, be at work, do my work, and get home from work--and humbug to the time in between.

Pat's toolkit
In addition to his account with AT&T Wireless, here's the hardware Pat uses to turn commute time into work time.
I've tried every means of conveyance available--car, bus, subway, and train--to shorten my daily 24-mile trek to the office. No matter how I go, it still takes me an hour at best.

AT LEAST, it did until a few weeks ago. Now I spend 25 minutes in transit--15 from my home to my local train station, then another 10 from the train's San Francisco depot to the office. Yes, I still spend 35 minutes on the train in between. But instead of counting that train time as commuting, I count it as work. That's because I got myself set up so I can connect to the Net while I'm traveling.

Now I spend those 35 minutes reading and responding to e-mail and planning my day. The way I figure it, working on the train saves me five hours and 50 minutes a week--about 24 hours a month, or 12 days a year.

I owe that time to Bluetooth, which has made it possible for my Palm Tungsten T3 handheld, my Sony Ericsson T616 cell phone, and my AT&T wireless data service to work together in a surprisingly productive combination. The experience has made a Bluetooth believer out of me.

More specifically, I think Bluetooth--the short-range wireless technology that has had so much trouble living up to its promise--is finally finding its legs in the marketplace and is on the verge of becoming a significant feature in more and more products. And I think Bluetooth could be the salvation of business-class PDAs, which are threatened with extinction by smart phones.

IT'S NOT EASY for me to admit that. This summer, I wrote to you about my mission to find the perfect all-in-one smart phone. My motivation: With a phone, a PDA, and reading glasses to carry with me, I had one too many things that I could misplace or lose. So I looked at a variety of smart phones, including the Samsung SPH-i500, the Samsung SPH-i700, the Hitachi G1000, the Siemens SX56, and the Handspring Treo 600.

All left me wanting. The i500 was too small, the G1000 too big, the SX56 too dated, the i700 too delicate. The Treo 600 came closer than anything to getting it right, but the display was too poor for my aging eyeballs.

Then Anthony Armenta, a Palm product manager, stopped by to demonstrate the new Tungsten T3 and a few other new Palm devices and accessories just prior to their October debut. (Watch the video here.) He arranged to provide me with a review unit to test-drive.

I was impressed enough to buy a T3 for myself and make it the cornerstone of my transit-reducing work kit. As you can see from the review, it's got all sorts of attractive features. But in my eyes, its biggest virtue is its generous 320 x 480 transflective display, which is large and crisp enough for my middle-aged peepers to efficiently process e-mail, Web news, and instant messages.

Yes, you can do all that on many cell phones now, but most phone screens are just too tiny for me to use for data.

OF COURSE, the T3 couldn't do any of that without some way of connecting to the outside world. For that, I'm using the Sony Ericsson T616, which won an Editor's Choice award from our reviewers and which I purchased from AT&T Wireless for $149 on a one-year contract. (I could have gotten it for $99 on a two-year contract but wasn't convinced I wanted to be wedded to AT&T that long.)

The T616 paired up easily with the T3, thanks to some Palm software. But I really like it because it gives me flexibility. If I just want to have the phone with me, I can. Its diminutive size, and waif-like 3.4-oz. weight wears well and unobtrusively on my belt.

That means it beats lugging around a PDA-sized smart phone. One prime example: I'm a Little League coach. This past summer I was test-driving the Samsung i700. It was just too big for a pocket or to wear onto the field. So I had to tote it in a pouch and leave it in the dugout, a situation that put me through one very anxious weekend after a kid from another team accidentally took it home with him.

As for AT&T Wireless' part in my commute-shrinking combo, it's been a pleasant surprise. I wanted to become a Verizon customer after having tried its CDMA network, which is twice as fast as AT&T's GPRS data network. But I opted for AT&T because it offered a Bluetooth phone (Verizon didn't) and, as an existing customer, I didn't have to change phone numbers.

PERHAPS it's because of the T3's 400MHz processor, but I'm finding that my download times for news and e-mail aren't unacceptably slow. And AT&T is only charging me $2.99 a month for the Office Online service that allows me to connect to our Microsoft Exchange server here at work.

This is not to say my setup is perfect. I wished the T3 had Wi-Fi. The T616's display is hard to see in the sunshine, and the phone can't be upgraded to AT&T's speedy new EDGE data network. In addition to voice minutes, I'm paying AT&T nearly $13 extra a month for a 4MB data package--and I'm still compelled to watch my consumption closely. And the $475 I spent on hardware alone is several times more than most phones cost.

But, then again, when I consider that I'm cutting my commute time enough to equal two weeks and two days of extra vacation time, I can enjoy the ride more than ever before.

What do you think? How do you remain productive even while you're commuting or traveling for work? TalkBack to me below!

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