Wrapping up

I went to the UK and Europe with no technology but a smartphone. How'd it work out?

Did I need any other devices? No. There was not one moment at which I wished I had a laptop or a tablet. There's basically nothing in that line that these smartphones can't do. There were moments when I could have made use of a proper camera, but I never found myself really regretting not having one. The photos I've brought home on the Desire are of acceptable quality and I can show them to people right on-screen, as the screen is so large. And there are only 79 of them. Beat that!

Was the Desire the right device to take? It's hard to say without trying out other devices. Any decent smartphone would probably have done the job just as well. The functions I mostly used were the browser, camera, and inbuilt Google navigation (with GPS). There are a good handful of devices offering the same functions with the same quality, but I'm still very pleased with the price at which the Desire offers them.

Did I use the Desire right, having got it? On the whole, yes. Buying a local SIM was the best thing I could have done, as it gave me constant access to data for navigation purposes. To my surprise, I also used quite a few of the free texts that came with the package.

There are two things I would do differently next time. I'd definitely try harder to get a spare battery and external charger. Although I was lucky enough to have a trustworthy roommate this time, it would have been good to be prepared for having to lock my phone away at night (though then I wouldn't have been able to use it as an alarm clock - a standalone alarm would probably be necessary). The other thing I'd change is to rely more heavily on Google Navigator. At first I tried to get around by just looking at the maps, whereas Navigator would have meant fewer wrong turns and less confusion on the many street corners in London that have no visible signs.

Would I do it again? Yes, of course.

Changi again

My earlier-than-expected departure from Belgium meant longer than expected in London just before flying out, which ment more walking around chilling (lovely), which meant more use of the GPS, which meant less battery. By the time I'd navigated through Hyde Park and written a few last emails, the battery was pretty wasted, and I still had at least 33 hours before returning to my own power supply.

Imagine my delight, then, at discovering that Changi airport offers not only free WiFi but free power as well! And the sockets take a European plug with no adaptor. Just as well, because like an idiot I packed all my adaptors in my suitcase.

So I'll make it to New Zealand with battery to spare for the frantic phone calls that will have to occur if another earthquake affects Christchurch airport while I'm in transit there. (I basically haven't used my phone for games or books while travelling, cos I've been so concerned with saving the battery for emergencies. And I never did load any music on it.)

Before switching on at Changi, I put my New Zealand SIM back in. This had the result that I received 66 Wellington train service updates by SMS as soon as I switched on. Hate to think what that cost me.

Things that worked out well

There is less than £3 remaining on my Loaded card, and £1.37 credit on my Vodafone UK SIM. And I'm leaving in two hours.

My little research buddy

Apart from keeping in touch with people, the main use of my phone this trip has been to research activities. Without it, I wouldn't have known the Tates were open late Fridays, or that the London Eye was indeed still running at the time I suddenly had the thought of going on it. Wouldn't have known how to get to Greenwich. Wouldn't have known how much cash to put on my Oyster to cover the last few trips after my weekly pass expired. Definitely wouldn't have been able to buy at such short notice the plane ticket that's about to get me out of strike-ravaged Belgium, where the Eurostar is not running. It's so handy to have all this stuff literally at my fingertips, so I can look up another activity while travelling to the next one.

Welcome to France... Belgium... Germany... Germany... Germany

The two days I was in Germany were "internet off" days to save my Vodafone credit. My lovely hosts lent me a netbook for internet (how nice!), so my phone became an alarm clock for a while.

Walking around central Muenster, I kept switching from one network to another, and every time this happened, Vodafone sent me another "welcome to Germany" SMS. When it came time to turn my internet back on this morning, I had to restart the phone before it would get signal; maybe a side effect of all that network switching?

While travelling on European trains I've found the GPS invaluable for knowing when to get off. As mine is invariably the biggest bag on the luggage rack, it helps a lot to be out in the corridor with it some time before the station announcement gets everyone else to their feet, and I couldn't do that without the GPS telling me that the Hauptbahnhof is near.

Photography in a cold climate

While touring England and Scotland, I got rather good at using my touchscreen *through* my gloves. Even took a few photos that way. Though it's difficult to hold the phone still enough for a photo at the same time as applying thrice the normal pressure to the shutter softkey.

It became obvious very quickly that my phone camera isn't up to it. Its lack of light sensitivity means a high ISO must be used, destroying the image quality. It often struggles to expose appropriately, too, choosing a fast shutter (or low ISO, I don't know which) if even the tiniest bit of bright sky appears in frame.

The phone's limitations have rather set me free than the reverse. Instead of spending ages trying to create an impossible shot, I give in early and slope off to look at something else. Which is what it's all about, really.

And right now? I'm at Brussels Midi railway station. Roaming. For £2 a day. Received "welcome to France" and "welcome to Belgium" texts from Vodafone while on the train; that never gets old. These ones even included the local emergency number. How nice!

Formal reception

In the Scottish Highlands, us Vodafone users lost all coverage completely, but those who had opted for the bizarrely expensive "international SIM" were able to use their superior roaming facility to get reasonable signal from a particular spot by the window.

General badness

My Gmail account sent spam messages to everyone in my address book at 5am today (UK time). The password wasn't changed and I still had access to the account, so I just logged in and changed all the security settings. Then I started changing passwords on everything else, just in case. Since then the browser has become almost completely unresponsive and Google Maps crashes every time I open it. Commonsense says my phone is just struggling with weak signal in the stormy weather, but I'm concerned that I might have a phone virus. I wouldn't even know where to start with fixing such a thing.

Navigating on tour

In Bath, my phone couldn't get a fix from the network tower at all (although reception was good), and the GPS helpfully placed me somewhere within the borders of Bath.

Walking around in Bristol, I asked my phone to find me a supermarket and it told me I was in the country outside Salisbury.

Why???

Live demonstration

Today one of my colleagues asked about the Reserve Bank's latest published forecast, and I was able to whip out my phone and show him. Win!

Castin'

Watched the webcast of the Reserve Bank Statement live on my phone. It worked like a dream. The feed was almost more stable than the standard desktop feed is at home. I highly commend R2, the company that does the webcast, for making an Android-compatible feed available. Thanks guys!

To shop or not to shop

The Desire is supposed to fulfil all the functions of a computer. Admittedly my main non-work use for computers is to surf the net, so a smartphone was inevitably going to be a good fit. But there's one thing I often do on a computer that I haven't yet made work on the Desire, and that is shopping.

This lack of phone-powered shopping [1] is, admittedly, more Visa's fault than that of my phone. Visa's, and the merchants'. Using a Loaded for Travel card to shop online isn't the walk in the park that Visa make out (it's all very well telling us that the cardholder name should be "Loaded for", space, "Travel", but pray what billing address would be appropriate for that cardholder?). And a poorly designed merchant website is hardly my phone's doing. All the same, a poorly designed website will inevitably be easier to use on a computer, and then it wouldn't be such a chore having to go back and re-enter the cardholder name after capitalising it wrongly.

Instead of doing any of that, I've now turned up in person on the spot for three different events that could have been ticketed online. On net, it's saved me money. But it wouldn't have worked in the busy tourist season.

[1] I did buy something online from my phone before leaving New Zealand, but that was with a regular credit card.

Surfing the City

First real problem with my phone today. Gmail decided to have a little bad-cookie-no-refresh-no-message-sendy moment. Had to clear the cache, but then it was fine.

Network coverage is rather patchy, not (presumably) due to a lack of cell towers but because of all the tall buildings. Pro tip: trying to get a GPS fix while standing between two large stone pillars, under a stone overhang, is a stupid thing to do.

You are here

Since I arrived, my phone has mostly been a navigational tool, though I'm really appreciating having it to hand for general internet as well. (Something I hadn't thought about before: you can't surf the web on the Underground. And I thought the 8 minutes in the train tunnel back home was a trial.)

Although I repeatedly get lost, I have yet to be seen peering at a map in the middle of the street like some tourist. Instead I peer discreetly at my phone's maps, in small glances calculated not to attract attention. Yeah, that's me, the one with my thumb freezing out of my glove so I can use the touch screen. Yes, the one in the doorway cursing because the screen went to sleep and the GPS too and now the GPS is taking ages to get a new fix and I don't know where I am on the map. Yeah. Did someone say discreet?

Gratifyingly, the map data for a city like London is of such high quality that you can genuinely navigate with it - it took me right to the door of the Bank of England, where a similar destination in New Zealand would yield directions to the city block containing the building and leave you to figure out for yourself where the entrance is. Not that there's not room for improvement. A built-in guide to the multiple entries and exits of many tube stations would be one obvious thing to add.

The other day I took a photo and it sucked because the light level was bad. This did not surprise me.

A phone without credit is a useless shiny brick

Despite my intention to get a UK SIM right away, I briefly turned on my phone at Heathrow to see if 2degrees would repeat their goodness-you're-in-a-foreign-country act. They didn't, although the phone picked up a roaming signal soon enough. It reset its clock but continued to claim it was in Singapore. What this means I have no idea, apart from that it would probably cost me even more to roam in the UK than in Singapore.

So I turned it off and looked for a Vodafone store (Auckland airport has one, why not Heathrow?). Instead I found a vending machine with SIMs from lots of different providers. They were so expensive I thought they must come with credit, but no such luck - not even the token amount you get with a new SIM in NZ. Possibly I got screwed there. Waiting to find a store would certainly have made it easier to get credit.

The plan was to top up using my debit card, but that proved to be impossible without a UK billing address - at least over the phone. My London contact suggests that topping up online would have allowed me to enter an international billing address. Maybe; I'm sure I've never had to provide any address information when topping up by card in New Zealand, so I suspect the British providers of being unnecessarily parochial. Either way, I had no other internet to hand, and going to sleep seemed infinitely more attractive than going out in search of a convenience store. I eventually got a TopUp voucher this morning, but not before a frustrating game of tag with my contact trying to phone me and me unable to phone back.

The internet worked fine after I'd manually entered the settings I'd printed off the Vodafone website. Is it normal to have to manually enter APN details every time I change SIM? The Desire doesn't pick them up at all, nor retain old settings once the SIM is changed.

Later on, the GPS was incredibly useful in finding an alternative tube station when the one I wanted was closed. Although it does feel weird walking around in a strange, crowded, possibly hostile city with my expensive phone in my hand. The GPS nommed the battery, of course.

Ch-Changi

Changi airport Singapore. Free WiFi. Yes.

As soon as I switched on my phone it figured out where it was, switched to local time, adjusted my world clocks accordingly, and then offered up a nice message from 2degrees wishing me happy travels in Singapore (and warning me that actually using their services while there would bankrupt me). All good stuff.

The Gmail app won't send the email I just wrote, nor let me view the text so as to copy it to another medium, and while I was fiddling with that a notification came up about a problem with the SD card, but now I can't find the notification. All bad.

I gave in and bought a Stephen King book at Auckland airport, not because I particularly wanted a book but because the dear thing was literally the size of a credit card.

Leaving on a jet plane

In 12 hours I'll be in the air.

Before that, the Desire will need to be set up for 30 hours of limited power and internet. To save battery, turn off all networks, screen animations and notifications. To save data, turn off background data, auto-sync, and the mobile network connection itself. And then put it into flight mode, of course. For reading books on the plane.

Blogging over the next month will probably be frequent and irregular - whenever anything happens to make me feel that travelling with one gadget was a particularly good or bad idea.

As a final thought, here are some of the things I'm not taking because (I can't be bothered, and) the Desire has the same functionality:
Laptop
Tablet
Camera
Game console
iPod
Watch
Books (except a Lonely Planet)
Maps (well... just the ones in the Lonely Planet)
Lots of currency (the necessary transfers to supplement what I've got can all be done online)

I hate that I love my iPod

An iPod is such a selfish luxury. It lets you shut out the world and recede into your own superior little universe where your own needs are paramount. No one can get to you - not to exchange a friendly word, not to ask you for help, certainly not to inflict their filthy opinions on you. It's particularly useful on public transport.

I'll be spending an uncommon amount of time on various types of transport over the next month.

The Desire can play music, of course. But using it as an iPod will totally destroy its battery life, which, as I've mentioned before, is already not great. Taking an actual iPod isn't really an option - my Shuffle won't charge on my phone's charger, despite the USB interface, and with no laptop there'd be no other way to charge it. (Buying an Apple USB-to-wall charger just for this trip would definitely violate the Just One Gadget thing. It's meant to be all about minimalist packing.)

I guess I'll just put a few tunes on the Desire and try not to play them too much. But I feel I should really be able to do without my sad little music habit for one month. This is such a first world problem.

My phone isn't perfect

No phone is. Here are a few of the things the Desire does wrong.

It's difficult to press the sleep button without also activating the volume rocker, cos they're just around the corner of the case from each other.

There's no physical shutter button for the camera, so you have to be quite precise in touching the onscreen button without moving the phone.

Downloading updates to apps from Market generates a classic Catch-22. The phone checks and notifies on each boot, then tries to download the update for you, but cannot do so until you agree to the permissions. You can't agree to the permissions because the phone is trying to download the update. Fail. (There is a way out - cancel each download manually after notification, authorise, then restart.)

The autocorrect doesn't try to correct multiple hits on the same key, nor mis-hits on space or full stop. It does save words to the dictionary at the drop of a hat. Since the start of this post I've inadvertently saved tthe, appps and sleepp. Don't know if it's possible to un-save them again.

Touching a point within an editable block of text usually doesn't take the cursor to that point. It puts it somewhere else - sometimes close, sometimes not - and you have to arrow to the bit you wanted to edit. You can't press and hold the arrow keys, so this involves lots of tapping. You can't press and hold to paste in a desired location - well, you can try, but you may or may not get the right spot.

The reaction to a long press on an editable block of text is unpredictable. Sometimes you get selection sliders, sometimes not (just "select word" or "select all"). No selection sliders makes copying or deleting a large block of text very cumbersome (or, if you prefer, "like playing tiddlywinks with sesame seeds," as I recently described this in conversation). Of course, it only becomes a problem if you're trying to do something silly like write a blog on your phone.

As previously discussed, it eats battery. I still haven't managed to get a spare - it got too late to ship before I leave.

As you'd expect, the browser doesn't play nice with some web pages. It struggles with text boxes (just will not size them to the screen, and sometimes the text you're editing vanishes under the keyboard) and doesn't properly display the 2degrees account page (a bit ironic, that). It handles popups with varying results. I can't currently upload photos directly to Blogger, though I'm not sure if that's due to the popups or to Picasa Web not supporting mobile uploads. I'm getting around that by uploading photos to Twitpic and embedding those in blog posts (sorry, Twitter followers, for any random photos appearing in my stream).

And it's enormous. There are acres of screen space, but I won't pretend it's not a little cumbersome.

Godforsaken white island

The commuter zone of Paraparaumu and Waikanae is generally pretty well served by the 2degrees mobile broadband zones - lots of lovely blue coverage on the map. Way down near Waikanae Beach, though, there's this godforsaken white island in the middle of all the covered areas. Looks like a giant signal shadow caused by a hill or something.

Guess where I'm spending a good part of my weekend?

Why I don't need to take a camera on holiday

The previous post made the case that the best moments in life are impossible to photograph, and to try to do so is to waste the moment.

Of course I realise that some moments are not impossible to photograph. There are experiences - mountains, buildings, people - that yield very well to photographic documentation. When this type of experience is in the offing, it's quite handy to have a camera available.

So it's just as well I've got the Desire. The Desire's own camera is among the best on the market. It handles a range of focal lengths with aplomb and produces perfectly acceptable zoomed and cropped images. True, there's no backward-facing camera, but it's easy to photograph oneself using the self-timer (the auto-focus is very good at spotting faces at arm's length).

The only issue I've really noticed with the Desire's camera is that it struggles with contrast a little more than you'd expect from a decent point-and-shoot (my reference standard is my Canon Powershot A650 IS, which probably isn't fair to the phone. The Canon's image stabilization is also sorely missed - it's very very difficult to get close ups without motion blur on the Desire).



For regular light conditions, though, it's usually fine.



And with the lens almost flush with the case, there are intriguing possibilities for close-up work with flash that could never be done on a point-and-shoot without an external flash (the lens would create a shadow when the subject is too close).

Why I don't want to take a camera on holiday

January 2010: "We call this whale Jack," said the Whale Watch operator over the loudspeaker. "He's a five-year-old male who feeds here regularly. We recognise him by his crooked tail flukes."

I and 25 other tourists gazed in awe from the swaying deck of the boat towards the surface of the ocean just metres away, where the shiny black barrel that was a breathing sperm whale could be seen appearing and disappearing among the choppy waves. We could see the blowhole open for each breath and shut up tight when a wave splashed across it. If we let our gaze wander a seemingly impossible distance toward the north, we could sometimes catch a glimpse of the remarkable creature's eye - making literal eye contact with a being that had recently been maybe kilometres below the ocean surface.

It was a profound moment. "This whale has now been on the surface for around 20 minutes," the operator interrupted, "so he could sound soon. I'll let you know when he looks like sounding so you can get your cameras ready for that all-important tail shot."

And I couldn't help thinking, all-important? Really? Did we come all the way out here just to take pictures? When there are thousands and thousands of whale photos on the web, all vastly superior to anything we could hope to achieve here with our substandard equipment and nonexistent skill. When we've just spent 10 minutes in the company of one of the largest creatures on the planet, an experience many of us will never repeat. Did we really mean to spend the time gazing through a viewfinder? Will we remember this by nothing more than a photo that didn't come out very well?


Does this look like a profound moment to you?

Do we really want to go through life taking pictures in case we forget something, instead of making memories we can't forget?

Give me my SIM again

Vodafone, Vodafone, Vodafone. You're no worse than any other mobile provider, I suppose. You did just fine giving signal to my old Sony Ericsson G502. With your 100 MB a month and the G502's Bluetooth modem capability, I could check email on my laptop as much as twice a week! And if I wanted to watch a video or something, there were always your mobile broadband TopUps, with which I could purchase as many extra 100 MB parcels as I liked.

But something has come between us. Dare I say, a secret Desire? As my first TopUp neared expiry at the end of my third week with the Desire (that's 200 MB and $20, if you're counting), I had to accept the inevitable - for the same money I could have had 1 GB in a 2degrees mobile broadband zone. And Vodafone, your customer service had just done something to annoy me, so off I went. 2degrees moved my number in just a few hours (on a Sunday night, too), and I bought my 1 GB and settled down with my new provider.

Since then it's been true love, or at least a case of "how on earth do I use up all this data?". I'm doing everything I can, including writing this entire blog on my phone. I'm even using the phone as a wireless hotspot for my Macbook, downloading updates and the like. There are still over 450 MB left after three weeks. Definitely a fairytale romance.

But not even 2degrees offer reasonable roaming fees. No one does at this end of the world; supporting customers over all that distance must be just too expensive. So once I get to London I'll be changing providers again, just for the month. (When this is possible, why would anyone roam at all? I don't understand.)

There are relatively good data allowances available to UK prepay customers. Just about every provider offers 500 MB for cheap, and some just hand it over for free when you top up. One, giffgaff, offers genuinely unlimited data along with an intriguing crowdsourced support model. (Sample giffgaff message board quote: "yes, the data is really unlimited, but they'll probably ring you if you get over 25 GB"). It's all terribly exciting and cosmopolitan.

But my month of travel includes five days in Europe, so domestic UK data isn't the only consideration. And who turns out to offer the only actual roaming data addon for prepay? Well... Vodafone.

How the &#%$ do I buy a spare battery?

The battery-eating properties of Android phones are well documented. Battery life isn't really a problem when you can charge up every night, but becomes one when you're on the go or sharing a room. I'd like to be able to stick a spare battery in a charger and put my phone away overnight, then put in the recharged spare next day. Not incidentally, I'd also like to read books on my phone during my 30 hours of travel, without being constrained by the capacity of a single battery. But neither spare nor charger prove easy to come by.

There's a Trade Me seller specialising in unofficial spare batteries, but the one they have listed for HTC Desire HD has a different part number to the one on my phone's battery.

There are various websites offering batteries with the correct part number, but they list them as suitable for other, mostly older, HTC handsets.

There's one seller on Amazon offering a battery with the right model and part number, but the capacity is greater. Will a higher-capacity battery damage my phone?

HTC themselves don't offer spares, at least not through their website. The manual says "replace only with recommended batteries", but of course there's no list of recommendations anywhere.

And there are heaps of "universal" external chargers on offer, but no way to tell whether any of them will work with a given battery type.

Any suggestions? Comment below.

These are the droids you're looking for

My path to the HTC Desire HD was short and direct. I Googled iPhone alternatives. Read a few reviews comparing the Desire, iPhone 4, and Samsung Galaxy S. Noted that nothing [1] could measure up to the Desire's 8 MP camera (not even the iPhone 4. What are you doing, Apple?). Priced it on pricespy.co.nz. Bought it from Expert Infotech in Auckland.

It cost me $568 including shipping.

Now don't be sad, iPhone users. Only the power of parallel importing allows the rest of us to buy our quality [2] technology for less than half the cost of yours. HTC would be annoyed if they knew, and it does leave me with peculiar cross-cultural hardware, like this power adaptor:



[1] The Nokia N9 has as good a camera, but I've been irrationally prejudiced against Nokias since working as a mobile phone tester during university holidays. The Galaxy S2 also has as good a camera; not sure why it didn't show up in my research, maybe it was too recent.

[2] In the absence of specialist knowledge, I defer to the opinion of blogs like this, which seem happy to treat the Galaxy, Desire and iPhone 4 as comparable.

iPhone? iDon't think so

If tablets are "giant phone things that don't even make calls", the next step was clearly to check out ordinary-sized phone things with full functionality. And the first step there was to deal with the iElephant in the room.

I wanted to get an iPhone, I really did. I wanted all my gadgets to synergise. I wanted to be a dick about ostentatiously using it on the train. I wanted to fall in love with a phone. I wanted to be brainwashed.

But when it came down to it, I just couldn't bend over far enough to be shafted that hard on price.

It would have had to be an unlocked iPhone. There's no plan available that satisfies me (I love that you abuse your highest-paying customers by offering them the same paltry data allowance as the lowest entry-level newbies). But the pricing for unlocked iPhones is frankly ridiculous. Why would anyone pay twice the price of a parallel-imported comparable Android handset? Especially when most of the droids have noticeably superior hardware? That's my holiday savings being wasted right there. No way.

Don't take them tablets

Tablets are small slabs of mobile deliciousness. They store documents. They play music. They connect wherever there's a mobile network. They go everywhere with you in your average briefcase, if you are a guy. If you are not of the briefcase-carrying gender, they go nowhere with you, because they're not actually that small.

Despite that last point, I had planned to get an iPad for my overseas connectivity needs, but then I discovered it would be 80% of the price of an unlocked iPhone. What's the point spending that much on a giant phone thing that doesn't even make calls?

No other companies had bothered to try to make me buy their tablets, so I didn't. Nyah.

Laptops are bulky and annoying

Let's face it, the age of the laptop is over. They're pretty much just desktop alternatives that you can use on the couch, or take home from work. Which is cool and all, but they no longer do the job as the work-on-the-go device they were originally conceived to be. You're only gonna use it for that if you're carrying it somewhere anyway, and you have a big chunk of time, and a good work area with WiFi and preferably power, and the work you need to do is more than checking email or reading papers. Cos that can be done much more conveniently on a tablet.

What would I need a laptop for on my trip? There are two possible things. I could use a laptop to download photos and share them with the folks at home. I mean, sure I could, if I wanted to spend an hour or so every evening sorting photos instead of sitting in bars. After which the photos would still have to stay on my camera for backups, cos I don't see me hauling a backup drive over there, so I wouldn't even be saving memory card space. And that's even assuming I could get good internet for the thing. In-room hotel Ethernet is horribly expensive and will only exist for the first half of my trip. Hotel lobby WiFi is extremely limited. So that leaves wireless at, like, McDonald's and Starbucks. I think I've already mentioned something about the preferability of sitting in bars.

The other thing I might use a laptop for is to write up the report on the work part of my trip. Shee, dragging a 2.5 kg hunk of metal halfway round the world for a month to spend two hours writing a 1000-word report? I dunno, maybe it would be worth it. After I recovered from the spinal injury sustained by carrying it around everywhere because leaving it in my hotel would void my insurance policy.

Laptops. They're so over.

Travelling connected

A trip to London and Europe looms. As I begin to pack for my first trip to the Northern hemisphere, the grim realities of air travel become apparent. A laptop is 10% of the baggage allowance. A tablet is too big for a handbag. External hard drives and cameras are delicate. They're all expensive to insure and effectively irreplaceable. And then there are the rules about which items have to go on carryon luggage, reducing the space for actual essentials. So many things could go wrong.

Surely there's an easier way?