In a previous post I was complaining a bit of the speed of the internet bandwidth from T-Mobile which was something like 3-4 kb/s. Well is some areas it went up to 30 kb/s and stayed at 20 average. But that’s not the point.
Even at 3-4 kb/sec one could use the internet for so many things – the first one is Google Maps. Undoubtedly one of the most useful apps. Especially when you can search for your hotel just when typing “The Gershwin Hotel” and it finds it or just “Public transport –> airport”.
But that’s not all. We could check in online. I could work using skype (Skype for symbian is just too slow, so I use fring; Fring doesn’t support skype chats though which is kind of annoying). We could search for nearby restaurants. We even bought tickets online for Madison Square Garden. We wrote mails, send pictures to friends which we just made.
But that’s not all. The top of the cherry is another amazing story. So here it is. On my laptop I didn’t have Picasa, which I needed to upload the pictures to Picasa Web Albums. So I wanted to download it, but I didn’t want to stay in the hotel and wait for 20mb to be downloaded while the laptop was using the phone as a modem, so I opened the default browser on the phone and tried to download Picasa on the phone. The default browser couldn’t handle the javascript so I tried with Opera Mini. The latest versions of Opera Mini download files themselves, they don’t depend on the default browser for downloads. BTW Opera Mini operates by using a special proxy which “chews” the internet page to be more suitable for the Opera Mini browser. So with Opera Mini the downloads started and while I was enjoying Chicago in my pocket Picasa3 was downloading. I could still make calls, browse with the default browser or use Google Maps. I downloaded Picasa for Windows and for Mac, and I downloaded each twice to make sure that at least one of the downloads would work. So in one afternoon being in the pocket Opera Mini downloaded something like 60 megabytes using a connection that could sometimes drop down to 1 kb/sec.