Traveling with my TyTN (general points)

I spent last week on the road, Sunday night through Friday afternoon, and here are a few thoughts. Many of these are really comments on Windows Mobile 5.0 and not strictly speaking on the TyTN.

First, I crossed a lot of time zones, and the visiting time zone feature worked perfectly. I really thought it wouldn't, because I've had such trouble with Outlook time zones not handling meeting invitations properly, but bottom line, it worked like a charm. I received Outlook meeting invitations from people in other time zones, forwarded them from my work email to my Yahoo email (the Yahoo webmail interface didn't recognize them as meeting invitations), and then downloaded them to my TyTN, which did recognize them as invitations, and accepted them. It put them on my calendar in the correct absolute time. Then, on the plane when I set myself as visiting the new time zone, they shifted right into place. Yes, I know it's basic and I shouldn't be surprised that it works, but I am. But it works!

Second, battery life. Lots of people have been complaining of battery life. I recharged my TyTN before leaving, used it as a phone on the way to the airport, used Wi-Fi in the airport for a few minutes (more in this in another message), listened to MP3's for about 3 hours, then another hour of cellphone use and a few minutes of Wi-Fi use, then another hour of MP3 use on another plane, then an hour of phone use, and still had 40% battery left. The catch is that the phone is off on the plane, and I turn on Wi-Fi only when I need it. I guess I'd always rather it had more power, but it was sufficient for the amount that I wanted to use it during 23 hours in transit.

Third, international roaming, worked no problem. Each new city took 1-2 minutes to find the appropriate frequencies and carriers, but everything worked fine after that.

Note that I wasn't roaming with a data plan, just a voice plan and Wi-Fi, since I'm still in the process of upgrading my data plan.

Fourth, recharging all over was easy, just pick the necessary adaptors and plug in anywhere worldwide.

Fifth, I really tried to go paperless and access all my working documents, maps, schedules, etc on my TyTN. On the one hand, they all opened up fine, including PDFs. On the other hand, they were hard to use sometimes on the TyTN's screen, so some things are still worth printing on paper :-(

Last, playing music in the TyTN's headphones came out very well, IMVHO. But I haven't spent that much time with an iPod, so I'm not really comparing. Stereo music through the headset is much much better than over their speaker, so don't judge the TyTN's music playing by its speaker.