Your Flight Has Been Delayed, But Not Your Business

My Cassiopeia Palm-size PC links via infrared interface to my Nokia 8290 cell phone and uses my GSM1900-compatible VoiceStream cell phone service to send

(The techniques described in this article should work with Pocket and Handheld PCs.)

The weather is great today in Phoenix, as usual. At least it looks great from the Sky Harbor airport terminal where I've been stuck for the last four hours. You see, the weather is awful in Chicago, as usual, and that's why flights have been delayed. "But I'm not going to Chicago," I plead, "I'm going to Dallas."

As if to a child, the gate agent patiently explains that, "the Chicago delays are rippling through the system, sir; our computers are overloaded, sir; and it's been a long day, sir; and..."

...and this is getting me nowhere. So I sink back in my industrial-strength airport waiting room chair and accept the fact that certain things in life are beyond my control. Fortunately, with the help of my cell phone and Palm-size PC, some other very important things in life are well within my control. It all started two weeks ago...

Finding the right cell phone and wireless service

I was planning for a trip that was going to take about a week. I'd have little time for programming and design work, and I wanted to travel light. So I decided to leave behind my laptop PC and accessories and rely on my Cassiopeia E-105 Palm-size PC linked to my Nokia cell phone to stay in touch with the world via e-mail.

We have a company Sprint PCS account and Sprint (www.sprintpcs.com) has an excellent wireless data service. I used this service before when I had jury duty. I used it with a Sharp Mobilon Pro H/PC Pro (www.sharpusa.com) and wrote about it in Pocket PC magazine (www.pocketpcmag.com/may00/juryduty.htm). Sprint, Verizon  (http://www.verizonwireless.com), and others use the CDMA format. There are a lot of good CDMA cell phones that feature a data modem but these all require a cable. For example, the Nokia 6185 I used with the Mobilon Pro had an IrDA port, but it can't be used as a data modem. And it didn't have a cable to connect my E-105 to the cell phone. I might have been able to use the Cassiopeia's sync cable, some adapters, and a PC data cable to connect it to the Nokia 6185, but it would have been a hassle at best. I really wanted to travel light and use the built-in IrDA port of my E-105.

Fortunately Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia all offer cell phones with a data modem and data IrDA port. A careful survey of these models shows an interesting limitation. If you want to access the data modem through the IrDA port your choice will be limited to a cell phone that supports the GSM1900 standard. So Sprint and Verizon accounts were of no help to me. We also have a company Nextel account and they offer data services. But Nextel is a proprietary version of TDMA so they were out also. However, my personal cell phone account is with VoiceStream (www.voicestream.com/product), which uses the GSM1900 standard ­ bingo! Now all I had to do was select the phone.

The GSM1900 standard was developed from the GSM standard used in Europe and Asia. So it's no surprise that there are many handsets with a "Dual Mode" feature, which is GSM and GSM1900. Also popular is "Tri-Mode," which is GSM, GSM1900 and Analog. These phones are very handy for roaming all over the world but our office already has a Nextel i2000 for this. The single mode GSM1900 phones are much smaller and less expensive so that's what I used. I selected the Nokia 8290.