Book-tours with Android

My latest Guardian column, "The mobile revolution has arrived," describes the way that touring with a rooted NexusOne phone fundamentally changed the experience of being on a book-tour, delivering a touring author's two most precious commodities: better food and more sleep.

Travelling with your own internet source is brilliant. At Atlanta airport, I was stuck for four hours while a monster storm hammered the building with barrages of lightning. Immediately, every one of the expensive Wi-Fi networks in the building went dead as thousands of stranded travellers tried to use them all at once. I found a corner with a mains outlet, plugged in the laptop, tethered my phone, and enjoyed my own private network connection. It wasn't fast, but it was free and it worked.
I still have a US T-Mobile account from when I lived in the US, and I pay for the unlimited data plan there (which, like the Orange UK Sim I use here, has a bizarre and fraudulent definition of "unlimited" that includes a data cap). It's easily worth keeping the account alive for those times that I'm back in the US - one day's 3G savings (not having to pay for expensive hotel and airport broadband) pays for a month's mobile service.

The mobile revolution has arrived

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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DrPretto

I love my Nexus One, I dont want to root it at this moment, but I installed Froyo 2.2 manually and it made it Much better. Now my battery lasts around 30h instead of 24h, and I have more Free memory (around 100mb or 200mb if using the advanced task killer). By the way I love surfing the web with my Adobe Flash 10.1, a really Magical web experience.
Now android is growing with better phones, apart from HTC Desire (Nexus 1 twin brother), the HTC EVO 4G, HTC Incredible, Samsung Galaxy S, and the forthcoming Motorola Droid X and Droid 2.
For sure this will be the Android Year.
I will always support Android and Linux based gadgets instead of crApple.
- turn_self_off
  
  sadly android is not that much linux. Most of it is inside the dalvik java VM.
elix

I’m not with T-Mobile PR, Cory, so I can’t be sure, but if your plan actually should be unlimited unlimited (i.e., no overage if you exceed X bandwidth usage), but after 10GB of usage in one month you’ll get throttled back to extra-slow (i.e., EDGE speeds).

For a very brief time, T-Mobile had a solid cap, and then they tossed it out again in favour of just throttling if you use more than 10GB of wireless data a month. (Wi-Fi, as usual, doesn’t count.)
hapa

maybe the revolution needs ground rules

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/grow_up._turn_off_your_phone/
Micheal Kelly

Hrm. I can do all of that with my non-rooted iPhone 3GS. But then, being in Canada I’m not on AT&T. It boggles my mind that they want to charge extra for the right to tether down there.
phead

Google Maps navigation must be better overseas, in the uk its somewhere between hopeless and “Turn left into the lake”. Tomtom is car navigation, end of story, its like comparing MS paint with photoshop.

As for the mobile revolution, the new isheep 4 data plans seem to have ended it. Do everything and anything with your new phone, but only for a few minutes till you blow the data allowance.
- Chesterfield
  
  phead, Google Maps navigation is quite good in the US.
func

I’m with Micheal – I’ve had tethering running for years on a normal Iphone in Canada. It really does rock – I set up a shared network running off the phone with my fiance last summer while she was working on her thesis, before our high speed internet was hooked up. Worked great for months.

That said, Canada has some of the highest mobile phone rates in the world, and being locked to one carrier is criminal for those of us who like to travel. My phone gets jailbroken whenever I go overseas – and I found that it was cheaper to run it with prepaid cards in Australia, Taiwan and Thailand than at home in Canada.
Johnny Washngo

I don’t have my N1 rooted but it does run FroYo which I have found to be fantastic on the daily train commute.

I can switch on the wifi hotspot on the N1, and connect my notebook to it wirelessly for surfing. Tethering is nice but I prefer to keep cables to a minimum ;)