Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Very Good Ideos
Being of a rather un-social (the uncharitable might say anti-social) disposition, I've never been into mobile phones. Well. I've had them, done a bit of urgent texting, made the occasional call to people (though rarely have let the number out), and in recent times mainly used them for taking photos and capturing a few random video clips on the run -- usually when the digital cameras have been caught short of battery.
But last night Michele's brother in law came round with a new acquisition -- a low end android phone, with the model name Ideos. And today we bought one, with a $30 pre-paid plan that should provide enough data download to last for our emailing needs whilst caught without regular internet access beyond occasional dial up on the current trip.
This is not phone-based internet access, however.
For those who are state of the art phone users this will doubtless be old news, but for us it came as a wonderful surprise when Chris showed us how his phone became an instant wireless internet hot spot. Just turn the thing on, activate the wireless hot spot function, then access the internet via laptop or netbook. The phone was around $150 Australian and the nice man where we bought it unlocked it for a little extra cash. Anywhere we care to buy a "pay as you go" sim card when visiting other countries we can have absolutely mobile internet access simultaneously on multiple machines -- enjoying the ease of comfortable computing with the mobility of a handset.
I've no doubt the main calling function will be to check account balances -- well, at least for me. It's very much a "desperate-measures" measure for internet access, but when staying for a month or more at a time in places without broadband access it is a brilliant stop gap.
And the rest of the time it can run off a plan and be the versatile, elegant, intuitive, highly functional little gem that it is.
And yes, it imports all your main google account settings automatically.
Delightful.
