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Such a weight off your shoulder for staying in touch
By Charles Wright
Sydney Morning Herald - July 2002
Although the Nobel Prize committee has yet to recognise The Edge's exhaustive research into the physics of airline carry-on baggage, we know it's only a matter of time before all the textbooks are reqwritten to reflect our findings.
Our Principal breakthrough is the discovery that the forces exerted on an object's mass by the acceleration of gravity are immediately doubled by its insertion into a briefcase or overnight bag.
This means, of course, that the laptop that appeared to be absurdly light when you firts bought it or popped it on a desk, precisely doubles its wight the minute you try to carry it around an airport terminal.
Only slightly less significant is our identification of a previously unknown phyiscal force, which we've dubbed the accumulating attractor.
This force, exerted through any piece of mobile electronic equimpent, immediately draws to it other pieces of heavy electronic equipment.
You might start with a laptop but vey quickly you'll find it has surrended itself with a power adaptor, extra battery, cords, cables, CD drive, perhaps even a scanner.
You will see the consequences of these little-known physical laws every day, in the waiting rooms of physiotherapists and deep-tissue masseurs.
Having spent what seems several lifetimes dragging our sagging shoulders around the infinite concourses of the world's airlines, it's little wonder that regular travellers like The Edge are rapidly going off laptops.
What we are looking for is something that allows us to do our essential work and maintain communications, without rearranging our muscular-skeletal systems.
We think Microsoft's Pocket Pc, with its cut-down version of the MS Office suite and easy synchronisation with the desktop and LANs, offers many attractions, particularly as it gains processing power and multimedia capabilities.
But for the casual traveller who doesn't need to access to those applications, perhaps the best antidote to the forces we've identified is a modest but surprisingly powerful piece of technology called the PocketMail Composer (pocketmail.com.au).
It's a blend of new and old techonologies - essentially a clam-shell pocket organiser with those old acoustic couplers of the 1970s that allow you to transmit and receive data through a handset.
For $199 you get the translucent plastic organiser, made by Oregon Scientific - which weighs 223 grams with its two batteries - and a tow-month subscription for unlimited e-mails and 50 sms messages. You can recharge it for $21.95 a month.
The package includes a pocketmail.com.au e-mail address that allows you to send and receive e-mails and SMS messages using any telephone - including publich phones and even the tiniest mobile phone.
You dial the service's number, position the adjustable, fold-out accoustic coupler against the handset, and with a few electronic squeaks and squawks - which generally take less than a minute - you've accomplished the job.
In Australia you dial into a toll-free nationwide number. Overseas you have to dial into the sane number, which means you're going to want to use one of those discount calling cards that any international traveller should, in any case, immediately track down in any foreign destination, rather than contribution to the Hotel Industry's Dialup Enrish Ourselves Scheme (HIDEOuS), or the financially paralysing global roaming service so generously provided by the GSM network.
The local PocketMail operation expects shortly to finalise a global roaming agreement with their couterparts in the United States, Canada, Britain and places such as Singapore, which will mean local call access in those countries.
We sent some friends off to Europe with a Composer recently, to test its overseas capabilities.
They were delighted - duplicating the experiences of the international sailing community and the Winnebago cult, who apparently wouldn't dream of travelling without their trusty pocket e-mail thingy.
Touch typists aren't likely to be enraptured by the keyboard but they found it relaively easy to master, and we are assured by PocketMail that a cross-country walker in the US has written and dispatched an entire book tracing his footsteps in daily instalments.
They found telephone line quality on occasions extended the time of the call - generally it takes about 30 secods to send or receive three 500-word e-mails - but all in all they judged it a highly worthwhile investment.
Before they left, we helped them synchornise their destop PC's address book with the organiser's software, using the supplied serial cable, and we went through the instructions in the manual.
It was so simple, however, that we're pretty sure even a total computer novice should have little difficulty mastering this device.
We found the technology suprisingly foolproof, and we can imagine why people in remote centres like Alice Springs and Katherine have adopted it as their sole Internet device.
There are some limitations. The system can't cope with e-mail attachments, and incoming e-mails are limited to 6000 characters.
You can, however, read those attachments and full message texts at an Internet cafe perhaps, using the personal Web mail feature on the PocketMail website.
You can also set up the system to receive copies of e-mail sent to your regular POP e-mail account.
The Edge was very impressed with the unit and the PocketMail service. We think it will take a good deal of weight off your mind.
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Media Contacts
USA/Canada
David Marchant
(408) 689 1240
PocketMail Inc.
david.marchant@corp.
pocketmail.com
Media Kits
•PocketMail® Composer™
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