Jambox fun

My wife and I recently completed a long road trip (2,000 miles in all). We had a blast in North Carolina.  As you can imagine, the car seems to shrink after a few hours. We traveled through the New Found Gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains; very beautiful and worth the 2+ hour detour.

In the car we have XM radio and 10 gigs of music on our iPod Touch.  We were tired of news and music after 4 or 5 hours in the car.  We decided to download some comedy (Jerry Seinfeld to be exact) on our iPhone. While it took a bit if time on the sometimes 3G network, we got it done. My new iPhone doesn't integrate into my car sound system (thanks Apple for changing the interface again).  We brought our Jambox  on the trip to listen to music in our hotel room.  This turned out to be a handy gadget in the car.

Since my iPhone car interface wasn't working, we just leveraged the Bluetooth connection from my iPhone to the Jambox and we were in business. We set the Jambox on the dash and we were able to listen to the iPhone with great sound quality. It helped to pass the time. Just another fun toy that has its practical side too.

Doing more than email & browsing on an iPad

I have had my iPad for more than a year. Love it for email and browsing the Internet. I still find it hard to create and edit documents. I have a wireless keyboard and that helps. Not being able to update native Microsoft documents is a problem. I have third party apps that help but it is still not very seamless.

I ran into another challenge yesterday. I received a zipped file from our auditors and had to go get another third party app to open it as well. In most cases I have found tools to get by limitations but the user experience falls short on the favorable user experience meter. I still love the portability and instant on of the iPad and I do think it has it's place as a standard offering for IT departments. Security is still a challenge as well. I expect this will get better over time as Apple and other providers respond to enterprise level concerns. A new iPad is due out this summer, let's see what it can do in terms of filling some of the current enterprise level gaps.

WiMax sadly not for me...

Well I tried Clear.com's WiMax service over the past several days with mixed results. At times, performance was excellent however there were too many instances of lost connectivity. My laptop is my office phone when I am on the road and at home. While on conference calls from home I could hear 75% of conversations and as you can imagine that isn't quite good enough. I switched back to my cable modem and the problems were eliminated.

I will try again in a six months or so. I know they are working on adding more towers and improving their service. I really like the idea that there is a solid (and portable) option to cable or DSL in the not to distant future. For me however, WiMax isn't there just yet - at least not in my neighborhood.

WiMax 4G...checking it out

I picked up a a 4G WiMax modem yesterday to take it for a test drive. Basically all you do is plug it in for power and connect it to your existing home wireless router and you get instant internet access.

So far the speeds have been very good. I am seeing between 5 and 6 MB download speeds and .5 to 1.0 MB upload speeds; consistently better that my Charter service. I have a 10 day trial. The cost is about the same as cable...$50/month. . So far so good.

Have your tried WiMax yet?