How my Treo 650 spent its vacation (hint: it didn't get a vacation, I did!)
[From TjL] I've been on vacation with several friends in San Diego. They mock me as the techno-geek of the group, but several of them came to appreciate my Treo 650 during our trip.
We were flying Delta so I signed up for Flight Notifications which sends me text messages to tell me when and what gates my flights are leaving from. They will update as the flight numbers or gate numbers change.
I sent others text messages as we were getting ready to take off and land so they'd know when we could meet. (Hint: I wrote a text message "We just landed" while in-flight and clicked 'Send'.... since my phone was off, it told me that it would resend my message as soon as I reconnected with the network. When we landed, I turned the radio on and the text message was instantly sent and I could go about getting my bag out of the overhead compartment.)
On one flight I was sitting next to someone who had a Blackberry. I hadn't known much about them. All I knew was that they could do email. I asked him how he liked it and he said he liked it pretty well. He said he just used it for email but liked "having his calendar and address book all in one thing". I remember thinking "Exactly what is he getting out of the Blackberry that I'm missing?" He asked about my Treo, and I went on and on. I showed him my list of books from Audible.com and AudibleAir, a small assortment of games (including my personal addiction: Tetris). While I was talking to him, Chatter popped up to tell me I had an email message and I explained that I had essentially the same "push" email he has in addition to everything else. I pulled up an email one of the group members had sent me which had a Word document of our itineraries and cell phone numbers. I opened it in Documents2Go and I added the numbers as favorites in my Treo along with the hotel where we would be staying.
I realized that I had my Treo out for most of the flight, playing Tetris while I listed to an audiobook. His Blackberry went in his pocket and never came back out.
We got to baggage claim and I realized that I didn't have the address of the hotel. I realized that I could have fired up Opera Mini and found out the address, but I wanted to keep an eye out for my bags. I could have called, but it was pretty loud. So I sent a text message to my friend and asked her for the address and the cab company she had used and about how much to expect to pay.
We got a cab from the airport and I turned on my GPS to make sure that we were going fairly directly from the airport to the hotel (which we were).
We've been using public transportation a lot, and one morning someone recommended a restaurant for dinner. I went to http://wap.switchboard.com and plugged in the name and came out with the address and phone number, called up. The restaurant didn't take reservations, so we went back to brainstorming and thought of another place (there are 10 of us, so not having reservations was not an option). Went to Google Local and found a list of places and one that someone else had heard of. Called there and they made a reservation for us.
Suddenly it no longer seemed so "geeky" when they realized how handy it could be. There was no way I would have lugged my laptop around all day, but I had the internet on my hip.
One friend asked if she could check her email. I knew that Opera Mini could probably handle Yahoo Mail, but instead I pointed it to http://m.google.com and searched for 'mobile yahoo' (she has a Yahoo email address) and found http://mobile.yahoo.com/ where she was able to read her email to pass the time.
The hotel we're staying at has WiFi, but it has a per-day charge and, outrageously enough, if you connect more than one computer to the same WiFi connection in your room, they charge you TWICE! My wife and I each brought laptops, so even if we both wanted to be able to get on, it would have cost us double! But I have an unlimited data plan with Sprint, so all I had to do was turn on BT DUN and I was able to get us online (that's how I've been reading PA and how I'm sending you this message).
Friday night 5 of us went to the Padres baseball game. There were several other games going on, but we didn't want to have to keep watching the outfield scoreboard, so I went to http://textalerts.sprint.com/ and signed up for text alerts for the various teams we were following. Often times I'd get the final scores of the games before they were even posted on the stadium scoreboard.
All of us are solo pastors of churches across the USA. We usually end up preaching about 45 Sundays a year, so when we go on vacation, we don't skip church, we go to hear someone else preach! Otherwise we never get to hear sermons except our own.
Saturday night, we were out to dinner when several of us decided that we wanted to go to MCC San Diego. While we were waiting for our meal to come, I found their website (http://www.mccsd.org/ ) and it listed their worship times. We called the hotel (using the "favorite" entry I had added during the flight out) and booked the hotel shuttle for the next morning to take us to/from church.
Again someone had an idea for a restaurant the next night and I found it on http://wap.switchboard.com. Someone else said they would take care of making the reservation, so I handed her my Treo with the address/phone information on it and watched as she fished for a pen in her purse and wrote the information on a scrap of paper (maybe even a napkin) and thought "Wow, I would totally lose that small piece of paper, how much better would it be to have it stored somewhere, or email it to yourself!"
I had been talking to someone else about selling my laptop (she's getting ready to go off to college in the fall). I had Mundu running, and she IM'd me to tell me that she had decided where she was going to go, and that she DID want to buy the laptop, but she had a few questions, all of which I was able to answer before the appetizers came!
On the train ride back to our hotel, someone realized that they had forgotten something at the restaurant. We used my phone (since I had stored all the numbers) to call some of the others to see if they had already left the restaurant. They had. I remembered that we had made the reservation using my Treo so I pulled up the Call Log and looked for the entry about the time from the day before. We called and they found what we had lost and put it aside for us (much better than waiting until we got to a phone book and risk that someone else might have found it and taken it as a souvenir!)
My wife wanted to find out when Legoland was open, but it was after 11pm on the weekend and she was sure that there wouldn't be anyone there to ask. But I was able to pull it up on the website and find out for her (unfortunately the website design is terrible, but I was able to get what I needed) and we made plans to go there Monday.
(This may be the best part:)
As I mentioned, we're all pastors, meaning that we're always on the lookout for good sermon illustrations and interesting factoids. Today during the sermon Rev. John Gill mentioned about the 3 most visited places in the world(*). I realized that I might want to use that tidbit in a sermon, so I casually slipped my Treo out and typed out a quick message to myself. One of my friends realized what I was doing, and leaned over to me. I thought she was going to tell me to put it away during church, but instead she whispered, "Send me a copy of that." She had the same thought I did! After that I gave my full attention to the rest of the sermon, making sure that the volume switch was over so that it wouldn't ring or have a calendar reminder go off during the service. Afterwards I told Rev. Gill about texting myself and he got a big kick out of it. He understood completely.
This afternoon we were at the San Diego Zoo when I realized that we had a car rented for tomorrow, but didn't have a car seat reserved for our 4 year old son. I pulled up my email and got the confirmation number for our reservation as well as the number for the car rental agency. I called to make sure that they'd have one for us to use when we pick the car up tomorrow morning.
I don't think I could count the ways in which I've used the Treo in less than a week. I certainly couldn't count the number of times that I've used it. Re-reading this email I realize not just how many things I've done, but how many things I didn't have to remember to do later. Instead of "Remind me to call the car rental place" I got the information that I needed, and I called them right away. Instead of "We need to call the restaurant when we get back" we did it right away. Instead of "I hope I can remember to do X" I could either do it or make a reminder to do it and set an alarm to remind me.
No napkin nor pen required.
As if that wasn't enough, Tetris helped me whittle away the inevitable "wasted time" (standing in the line to cross the border coming back from Tijuana, waiting for the train to come, etc). Really, what more could I ask for?
(*) He said they were Orlando, Rome, and Mecca. I don't have a source for where he got the data, but it certainly makes sense. The message I sent myself was just those 3 city names, which would be enough to remind me.
