Dumb Questions about Smart Phones

BSo as of the start of September, I am going back to the land of the Long Commute. This time, the commute will be taking place in an S-bahn without transfers and with minimal walking at either end. The question arrises – how can I make the best use of this time (45-50 minutes each way)? And what new toys should I buy to do this?

I am still going to call this Germany-related because you have to get your phone and web access through a German carrier. I am guessing that the answer here isn’t necessarily the answer that would apply in the States.

This is what’s knocking around in my head at the moment -

Iphone cons

• Not external keyboard!!! If I want to do some heavy duty typing at some point, I would be SOL
• The cheapest plan is 30Eur a month – no Tmobile Hotspot coverage (can you still pay to use one?)
• To use Fring (to use Skype) you have to jailbr.eak the phone. We would probably want to wait until that whole process is a little more stable.
• One choice of carrier

Mini-computer cons

• portability

Blackberry cons

• have heard that there are a lot of pages that don’t load well
• I want to keep my email where it is (online) so I am not sure that their system does anything for me

I have a phone with a contract that works for me, and phone cameras don’t generally take good pictures anyway. So those are lower priority items.

I will update this with more info, but wanted to get it started now.

New York Tips

In my hunting around, I did run into a helpful site for finding places to eat in NYC.

Time Out magazine’s web site.

For picking out a show to see, I generally check out reviews and deals at the following sites

• Terry Teachout (Wall Street Journal) – look for the “So you want to see a Show” posts
• New York Times list of critic’s picks
• Broadway box

Frugal Travel Alert

I have no idea how good the information is likely to be, but I ran across an New York Times web page -

The Frugal Traveler Does Europe on A Budget

and I thought some of you might be interested. I will try to keep an eye on it and let you know if I see anything particularly intersting in our neck of the woods.

In other travel news, we were just introduced to Couchsurfing last weekend. Although I don’t know if we will be headed out into the wide world, and we are definitely too fuddyduddy to attract anyone to stay with us, there seem to be more meetups in my area scheduled through couchsurfing than through Toytown.  We went to party last Friday evening and hung out with some of the same folks the next day. Hopefully, we can arrange to have people over to our place to watch and EM game soon.

MG – would you be willing to guest-write a review of the hotel you stayed in in Paris?