Kneepads!
Always a joy trying to decipher such crypticism, WAPman! I'm guessing always-on-the-move Jay's been rollerblading.... time to move on to a Razor scooter Jay! Quite hooked on it myself..... compact enough for most coatchecks too....
After that WAP hullaballoo on the thread, decided to try it out (the gizmo that is, but should have stuck to the stocks) and see what it's all about ... got myself a Motorola 7389 over in France... worked like a charm... totally cool the info you can access... restaurants, bars what have you.... too, CCF was listed as was LindWaldock as WAP enabled; friend at CCF confirms yeah, sure you can check balances and pay bills on the go. Guy selling the stuff says le Japonais are even further ahead. Was always skeptical if I needed a mobile in the first place but decided that the tiny gizmo had all the functionality I need (and then some) to ditch my notebook while travelling (basically telephone numbers and bar/restaurant/event guides) plus a single number for people to call me at. Can't lose I thought. Hah! Anyway, get back to NYC, call Motorola for an English version of the manual and find the phone's not due out here till later this year. Motorola UK has the phone but the manual is for the earlier non-WAP model. Call Sprint which says no go, gotta buy the phone from us. Stroll over to the AT&T store down the road and helpful dude tells me the three little pigs story - you guys over in England and Europe use GSM, (er I live here I mutter) and over in many parts of South America they use GSM too, we at AT&T use TDMA, Sprint uses CDMA and Omnipoint is the only GSM carrier on the east coast. So I stroll over to Omnipoint reseller, buy a chip and viola! it works. Find out from a friend who says that over in India it's GSM too, so I see some easy chip-flipping mid-flight. Anyway, Access Internet? it asks, I say Oui. UP.link address not entered it says. Call Omnipoint and woman says you want what? And I say I want the UP.link address to enable my WAP phone and she says your what phone? I say WAP. What? Wap. And she goes.... what's WAP? I sense defeat and say ummm...a phone that can access the internet? And she says, oh we got that, enter www.omnipoint.com in your browser and it'll take you to our website... buahahaha ... seperately try to synchronize my phone with Outlook on my desktop and no-go ...got an infrared adapter and it's not upto speed on Win2000 yet, and still find it hard to believe that there's only one manufacturer (Extended Systems) that makes the things!
So it's that old familiar feeling of having regressed back in time on the bleeding edge of techonology..... and vaguely wondering what the fuss about QCOM is....if the biggest and most advanced mobile markets, Europe and Japan are GSM, it ain't going away anytime soon? whatever.... long and short, the Peter Lynch "buy companies you're using and happy with" rule sez to me.... Motorola rules! great gadgets and even better, quite awesome service... as for Omnipoint... anybody got a howitzer in da house?? I'll be happy to dance on their grave..... un-expletivedeleted-believable how lousy they are....that ship should have sunk long ago... let's see if takeover by Voicestream makes it any better....
anyway...had to share that (mysterious stranger got gun to my head).... |
