Windows Mobile Louisville

Last week, my wife and I went on a trip to the Finger Lakes region of upstate NY for a nephew’s graduation.  While I know that it’s far from being a metropolitan area, my Sprint connectivity was so bad, my Touch Pro was reduced to being nothing more than a PDA like I had in 2001. I will add that my wife, my parents and one of my sisters are all Sprint users as well (with varying phones) and they too, had no signal or a very weak one…

I found myself cursing the lack of connectivity countless times while on the trip.  It became painfully obvious how much I depended on a data connection to perform much of what I do. 

I could not:

• send or receive emails
• send or receive texts (Text messages arrived hours later, when I experienced a moment of connectivity)
• Tweet my vacation moments or upload TwitPics
• check Facebook
• access Evernote
• send a JOTT
• Goosync my calendar
• Live Mesh my synched folders
• search for something on Google or Bing
• update my RSS feeds
• update my weather forecasts
• and, of course, make a frickin’ PHONE CALL!

Granted, it depended on where I was in the Finger Lakes region.  At times, I had a decent connection, but more times than not, I was in search mode, eating away at my battery like crazy.  PRL updates did nothing for me.  And to add insult to injury, my brother, who has an XV6800 on Verizon, had absolutely no issues, and was even watching the US Open via Slingbox on his device, sitting right beside me!  Obviously Verizon has a bigger stake in the Finger Lakes region than Sprint…

It really made me realize how vulnerable a data connection and cloud computing can be.  It’s great when there’s a connection, but when there’s not, you are screwed.  And what would that have been like for a web OS device such as the Palm Pre or Android?  I’ll bet that Sprint won’t sell many Pre’s in that area!

That experience was painful, and the gears are turning in my head to figure out how I could better survive a “no signal” situation in the future.  I will still employ all of the cloud computing services I use (Mesh, Evernote, etc), but I would advise to anyone who uses data heavily: have a contingency!

Oh, it’s good to be back in Louisville, with a strong signal and my precious data!  :)