Email is great, I assumes that you have internet access. And while WiFi access and internet cafes are readily available, they aren t always there when you have time to blog (like on a train or in your hotel) and they aren t always free.
Solution... Historically I was a PalmOS Treo user, as of last October I became a dedicated G1 user. But for this trip I m a BlackBerry user. I managed to stick with my G1 for our Vietnam trip of about 2.5 weeks living off of free WiFi hotspots, but for this trip, a 1month trip through India, we knew that WiFi would not be as available in many of the areas we where going to. Plus being gone for a month, I knew for work, I d like email access on the go. So why Blackberry, well for those of us in the US on T-Mobile (I don t know about other providers) we have the option to sign up for International Blackberry service for an addition $19.99 a month. This means as long as you have service (and T-Mobile has great roaming coverage) you have email access anywhere you stand.
So blogging solved. Blog via email to your blogger account sent via your Blackberry. And yes I know that typing a long blog post (like this one) can take awhile on a smartphone (especially a Pearl with its small keyboard, but I find typing on any smartphone is a bit slow) but there is a simple solution there too. You can type your post on your laptop (in our cases, we have an 8.9 Acer and a 10 Eee, both excellent for travel) and then connect your blackberry via USB and copy the text file over and even images. One quick note, make sure to save your text file (and make sure it is TEXT, not word or such) in 'Unicode' or you'll have to fix all your 'symbols' like quotes and stuff, also if you have word wrap turned on in 'NotePad', disable it before saving. Your file will be significantly bigger in Unicode, but it will save you time in editing.
Once copied to the blackberry, simply disconnect the usb (I guess you could use bluetooth, but it will be slow, especially if you are tranfering images) and you can open your tet file via the media browser. Then simply cut and paste the doc into an email, attach your images and press send. Off goes your post. One recommendation, unlike sending via a regular network connection, I heavily recommend shrinking your images to a decent size for email, especially when using some of these new cameras with 10MP+, images can be over 2mb and that can take forever to get off via a blackberry.
One more thing I ll have to research via full internet access later (since I m posting this entry via the method described here) is I think that I remember that if you have the blackberry software installed on your computer that you can send emails from outlook through your phone. If anyone has done this please comment and let me know& if that is the case, I ll definitely be paying for WiFi access the next time I m near one and downloading the software.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
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