Toys

[brrm]

Considering a Treo 180 again.

Does anyone happen to know:
The Vodafone website lists prices for 'WAP over GPRS' for Pay As You Talk (the plan I'm on).

a) does this mean I can do Real Internet Stuff over GPRS with PAYT as well (as the Treo does this)?
b) if so, is 0.73p/KB going to add up to $LOTS for the odd ssh session/google access per day?

i.e. maybe I'd be better off going for something like their £15/month plan with £6 of "online data" and 100 anytime minutes.

It's all so complicated. :)

Update: Oh, and for those who have one, how's the keyboard?

Comments

[chrisvenus]

a) call me controversial but I would be thinking that "WAP over GPRS" means that you can do WAP over GPRS. You might be able to do more but I doubt it.

In a more technical sense I would think that the only internet service you will be able to access is their WAP gateway. If you can do clever things to get to the internet through that you may be in luck.

b) Can't you just see how much bandwidth these things use?

At a rough guess "a couple of googles" will be 2k for the main google page, call it 15k for results pages and assuming you want to look at pages afterewards then call it another 20k for the pages you look at. That's nearly 40k which will work out at 29.2p for the 40k of data.

As for ssh. No idea how to work that out in quite as simple a fashion. I'd suggest just doing some kind of traffic monitoring on an ssh connection that you can consider "typical" and see how big it is.

Maths isn't that hard, you know. :)

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

You might be able to do more but I doubt it.

You're right: you can't. To get full IP over GPRS you need to go contract.

[juliet]

The Treo is lovely lovely shiny. I find the keyboard very easy to use - I'm certainly more accurate on it than I was with Graffiti. Note that you can actually get a Graffiti plugin thing (it comes on the install CD), but you have to write on the screen & it's a bit of a nuisance. The thumb-typing works just fine. V nice for SMS.

[gagravarr.livejournal.com]

There are two GPRS gateways used by Vodafone. One is called "wap.vodafone.co.uk" (though it's a GPRS gateway, so can be called whatever the hell you want, it's not named at the IP level....) When connected to this, you can access vodafone stuff, including their wap gateway. You can't, however, get to the OSW, except via their wap gateway, which is only for wap pages

The second gateway is called "internet" (note small 'i' - GPRS gateway names are case sensitive). This one gives you a 10.* IP, but full NAT'd internet access.

When you get GPRS, you normally only get the wap access point. If you connect on a more expensive GPRS package (either GPRS Select, which needs an expensive contract, or a paid up one), you get access to the internet AP. They normally enable it for you, but if it won't work, ring them and they'll set it up

Finally, SSH doesn't use too much data, but web access really does. Consider getting a WAP browser for your PC, as the pages are way smaller

[brrm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info - but, when you say "an expensive contract or a paid up one", do you mean more than the £15/month one that I mentioned?

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

With Voda, at least the contract I'm on [line rental only], full GPRS is a pay-for add on: I have GPRS 1, which costs me about 7 quid a month on top of the standard contract.

[gagravarr.livejournal.com]

Voice contracts are seperate from GPRS ones. That said, the cheaper GPRS tarrif with no bundled data is only available to people on more expensive voice tarrifs....

I think you need to be spending about 20 quid/month on voice tarrif to get the cheaper GPRS tarrif, which has access to the internet AP. Alternately, any data inclusive GPRS tarrif will get you internet AP access.

If you're on the 0.7x p/kb tarrif, then it's probably no internet for you, only wap. Get onto GPRS select (0.2x p/kb) by getting an expensive voice tarrif, and you get it. Alternately, pay them for bundled data and you get it

That clear it up?

[rejs.livejournal.com]

I tried one the other day in the Carphone Warehouse, though not a 180, and it wasn't powered on. Keyboard seemed perfectly usable despite the small size, quite probably quicker to use than Graffiti.

As for GPRS, you may find that for occasional use ordinary dialup suffices even at 9600 baud. It didn't look too bad when the bloke in the shop demonstrated it to me the other day (see my journal for more musings on the subject).