One of the features of this past trip was how bad my connectivity was. I was most successful at picking up my mail via WiFi or wired connections at hotels or people's houses. It turns out that the T-Mobile GPRS was absolutely useless at my Uncle's house in Simi Valley, because he's backed up to a mountain, and that's not very good for the radios. So my super cellphone turned into a super paperweight, and caused me a bunch of frustration because I expected to have that for connectivity. Then on the way home on Saturday, I was unable to get a GPRS connection throughout much of Oregon as well as most of the way home in Washington. Via Jon, I discovered that Russell pounded Tim Bray and Jeremy Zawodny about phones this week. I wonder if he's able to pound T-Mobile's network operations. I've wanted a notebook computer for a long time, but I didn't personally own one until 2001. I wanted to keep all my data, programs, etc with me. The phone as a data conduit for a computer is a fine use. But I do want the other stuff. My mom was amazed when I whipped out the 6600 and started taking pictures of the kids during one of the meals. When I told her it was a phone and a camera, she asked "what else". Then I took a movie of Michaela eating chicken feet. I think I forgot to tell her I could read my mail on it. If I could do video of sufficiently quality as a call, then I could punt my iSight off the island. Even better if I could use the video cell phone as an iSight when I'm at the computer. The biggest problem I see isn't the devices -- I think they're going to get there, although getting good integration with "regular computers" needs a lot of work. These things only work if the network is up, and after a week in which the most expensive phone (love those rebates) and the most expensive data plan gave me messages like "GPRS not available", "couldn't connect to host", and a few others, I think that the problem is still the network.