PDA Discoveries

[bjarvis]

My Blackberry has a lovely feature: the ability to disable data services when roaming. I shudder to think how much of a bill I could have run up checking email internationally! Being able to at least have the telephone functions available for emergencies has been a comfort.

The lack of email checking also had a clear impact on the battery life. Normally, I need to recharge my Storm every 48 hours. I've only had to do that once since arriving last Thursday. It will take some experimentation to determine if the energy expense is in the telecommunications or in the screen illumination when I look to see what news has just arrived.

Thank god Halifax Airport has free public wifi: I've been able to catch up on email at both home & work, cleaning up hundreds of messages. Otherwise, my poor PDA would explode with overactivity the moment it came within ping distance of a Verizon Wireless tower!

Comments

[musicbearmn.livejournal.com]

It's a lesson I learned the hard way from our trip to Vancouver this past summer. Next time I travel to Canada, disable we will do.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

:-) Yeah, I have to charge my phone roughly every other day as I don't talk on the phone too much but the emails that drop down, mostly from work and my Yahoo (LJ comments n' stuff) do take a wallop out of the battery life on a busy day.

All that said, you are right, the phone's standby times are quite good.

I love my storm, even if it's not perfect.

[weekilter.livejournal.com]

You shoulda already known this, but there are no Verizon towers in NS only Bell Mobility.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Uh, yeah, it's pretty clear Verizon has no towers in Nova Scotia. I was counting on that so I could use the no-data-services-while-roaming setting. That's also why my crackberry would suddenly churn with activity when I returned to the US if I hadn't deleted excess email: Verizon has plenty of towers here where the device would not be roaming.

[moofedct.livejournal.com]

iPhone has a similar feature. Nice to know we're not the only ones!