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Stephan Somogyi
When mobile phones are--and aren't--really mobile

Stephan Somogyi
Contributor, AnchorDesk
Monday, November 4, 2002
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Living in the 21st century as we do today, I can hopefully be forgiven for expecting that cellular telephone roaming should actually work.

My recent experiences with a dual-band GSM phone in Europe, however, have shown me that, while lip service is paid to the notion of worldwide roaming, the reality is a different situation entirely.

I JUST GOT BACK from a two-week trip to Germany and the UK. I was accompanied on my adventure by a Handspring Treo 270, a dual-band (900MHz/1900MHz) GSM phone that is explicitly intended to work on GSM networks throughout the world. (Check the ZDNet review here, the latest prices here.)

Until I had to turn off my phone before takeoff from San Francisco, everything worked great. I was cheerfully SMSing to and fro and everything worked as it should. (SMS, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is the acronym for Short Message Service, a useful--but in the U.S. woefully underused--tool for transmitting short text messages between mobile phones.)

When I landed in Germany, I was able to connect to two different GSM networks there. But I couldn't receive any SMSes. (Outbound SMS worked just fine.) Similarly, I had a hard time receiving inbound calls, even though outbound calls went through.

Given that I could reproduce this problem on both of the available GSM networks, and that neighboring European users were having no trouble receiving SMSes or calls, I began to feel a bit marginalized. Indeed, after trying to debug the problem, I quickly came to the conclusion that the Treo was working fine, and that the root of the problem lay in the fact that my U.S. provider, Cingular, seems not to have sorted out precisely how to make roaming work in Germany. Once I got to the UK, SMS and phone calls worked perfectly. In the context of worldwide roaming, it seems that "worldwide" is a very relative and subjective term.

Even though U.S. mobile network operators are only now adopting GSM, it's a mature and well-understood technology. There's little reason that what I was trying to do should not have worked. And given the exorbitant amount we all pay to roam overseas (all three U.S. GSM providers--AT&T, Cingular, and T-Mobile--charge an extortionate $1/minute for international roaming), you'd have thought that my provider (Cingular) would have at least made sure that roaming the G8 countries works without a hitch. I'll be repeating the experiment once more before the end of the year and will report back if anything changes substantively.

WHILE I CONTINUE to like the Treo, I've also been spending time with a Sony Ericsson T68i, which has some rather useful features of its own. For starters, it supports the third GSM band, 1800MHz, which is increasingly common in some parts of the world. Compared to the densely compact Treo, the T68i is a svelte device, bordering on the diminutive. (Check the ZDNet review here, the latest prices here.)

Inside the metallic blue-and-white exterior is one particularly compelling feature--Bluetooth--that lets T68i communicate wirelessly in all sorts of interesting, useful ways. One obvious example: You can synchronize the T68i's phone book wirelessly via Bluetooth. I was easily able to shuffle contact data between my iBook (running Jaguar) and the handset's internal phone book; the public beta of Apple's iSync works well with the T68i. I would dearly love to sync my Treo without a HotSync cable.

It's also worth mentioning that I can use the T68i as a wireless modem from my Mac via Bluetooth, for when I need to dial in to the Net but am nowhere near a landline. It's neither fast nor inexpensive, but when there's no other alternative, it can be a lifesaver.

Another feature that really makes me happy is the T68i's support for Bluetooth headsets. I categorically refuse to hold a phone up to my ear while driving. I use the Treo's wired earbud when I have to talk in the car, but I've found that the earbud cord has an uncanny knack for looping under my handbrake. Which means that, when I turn my head to check the blind spot before changing lanes, the earbud exits my ear in the opposite direction at speed. This is not useful.

With a Bluetooth headset, there are no cords. Admittedly, I need to remember to keep the headset charged and its little holster increments by one the number of techno-widgets that I have to keep track of on my person. But overall the benefit is huge.

And while the T68i is already plenty cool, Sony Ericsson is already near completion of the T68i's successor, the P800. While it lacks the Treo's full keyboard (so useful for SMSing), it looks like it has a number of other features that could be quite tempting. I'll report back once I've had a chance to actually try it out myself.

By day, Stephan Somogyi is the Director of Products at PGP Corporation. The opinions expressed in his columns are his, and his alone.

Do you roam internationally? Have any particularly good stories to tell? How important are PDA-style capabilities for your next phone? TalkBack to me!

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