New Phone!

[errantember]

After several years of being stuck in the Tech Ghetto with my old-ass Nokia 6010s, I finally signed up with Sprint/Nextel and got a Palm Centro. I've only had it for a few days, but other than the vague feeling, likely physically absorbed via nanotech from my Macintosh keyboard, that I should have gotten an iPhone instead, I'm very happy with it.

I have it set up to pull e-mail from all three of my e-mail accounts, including work. I'm on call during the day, and my previous low-tech setup made it difficult to tell when my job needed me. Now I've reached a whole new level of corporate whoredom with the ability to check my work e-mail from anywhere. This should help lower my stress level a lot, since I won't have to wonder if I'm missing anything important while I'm out.

I'm also supposed to be able to use it as a Bluetooth modem to get my laptop online, which I haven't tried yet.

This also means I have a new phone number, which I'm not going to post here, lest my pimp find it. I will be disseminating it to people as I call them. I'm keeping my old phone for at least a week or two.

Comments

[jb-27.livejournal.com]

It's my understanding that you used to be able to just modem through your phone, and if you had a data plan, there was no billing difference from using your phone's modem, but I believe that they CAN tell the difference, and they currently WILL bill you for it.

Tread carefully. That first $800 phone bill is a bitch.

[errantember.livejournal.com]

To use their current service, you have to get a login and password that's not necessary for "normal" data usage. This is how they keep track of who is and isn't supposed to be using the data pipeline for their laptop. I don't know *exactly* how, say, Blazer works on the phone. If it's going through some kind of really proprietary server, it might not be possible to spoof it. However, if all it's doing at some level is connecting using TCP/IP, it's definitely possible to set up a Bluetooth "serial port" between the laptop and the PDA. At that point, it's just a matter of routing the packets across to the PDA to Teh Internet. I used to have an application that did this over a physical serial port for my old Visor Prism, which allowed you to get online through an existing PC that was already itself online.

Another possibility would be to set up a website that works *with* Blazer that would act as a go-between.