Please help an ignorant person with a technology question. I would like mobile internet access and the ability to send and recieve emails. What is the best equipment for me? I will be using it in the UK and Europe. I'm not up to date on this stuff. Am I better off with a wi-fi enabled laptop, a Blackberry/PDA (dont actually know what a Blackberry is ) or some super mobile phone? Cost is not an imporatant consideration; being able to send or recieve an email from anywhere (and surf the FT boards from anywhere) is. Thanks.

Well if ease of use and surfing the web is what you want, then I think a laptop PC is a better choice than a PDA or smart phone. But if size matters...

With a PC in any Euro city you can find WiFi all over. Coffee shops, hotels, train stations and soon many of these cities will have wifi everywhere. WiFi gives you much better performance and bandwidth than the other choices which are GPRS and 3G. 3G is rolling out in some Euro cities now and it is pretty good performance, but as more and more users connect, the performance will drop at a much faster rate than WiFi.

If you are US based, wifi is better since you don't have to sign up with a Euro phone provider. If you are based in Europe then walk into any phone store to see the 3G options.

I've got both the wi-fi enabled laptop and Blackberry, and I have to admit that I've stopped carrying my laptop with me. Blackberry is perfectly adequate for internet access (FT is bearable rather than great, but it does work), and great for e-mail. For me, the killer USP is that I step off the plane, switch it on, and it works. No set-up issues, no funny passwords, credit cards etc, just a working GPRS connection.

But of course, others may have different thoughts (and in fairness, my laptop is 3 yrs old and weighs a ton!)

OK, so laptop with wi-fi needs a wi-fi hot spot

What sort of mobile phone signal does a Blackberry use (GPRS or 3G)?

Is GPRS slower than 3G (presumably it is because GPRS was 2 1/2 G) and is 3G slower than a laptop?

Sorry for all the questions.


Thanks. I was thinking about the new v thin Vaio laptop. Can you open Word attachements with a Blackberry?

Disco, you can use GPRS or 3G with your laptop too. Just insert a PCMCIA card for whichever one you want. GPRS is painfully slow though. If you want full high-speed coverage in places where there is no wifi, then get a 3G card from Orange or Vodaphone or whomever covers the most places for you. However 3G still has a long roll-out ahead of it and won't be quite everywhere for a long time.

Yup - can handle Word, Excel, Powerpoint and simple PDFs. There is quite a good starters guide here. The only thing I can't comment on is phone capabilities - as mine is a corporate blackberry, Megabank has chosen to block voice capabilities (mainly due to company policy which says that we should settle all expenses personally then claim back - whereas blackberry is on a fixed price per month GPRS deal). But I find it very handy. Of course, for others, YMMV.

You could do worse than a PDA enabled phone such as an XDA of which a mate has one and reckons the XDA is the one of the best bits of kit he owns. For something similar with a keyboard try the i-mate PDA2K http://www.expansys.com/product.asp?code=115927

Thanks for your help. A final question before I go shopping tomorrow - what sort of speed do you get with Blackberry internet access?

Have to admit, I had no idea what the actual speed is, but a quick check reveals that it's somewhere in the 28-56kbps range - so pretty much like dial up internet. Not the greatest, but a tradeoff for convenience I guess.

Of course you can resort to a couple of tricks to speed your viewing - e.g. BBC News has a low graphics version, which makes for quick loading, and on our very own FT, the archives are much faster to load than the live site (similarly because of reduced graphics). Downside of the archives is that you can't post - so fine for browsing, useless for posting.

I've often wondered if there was a market for "Mobile-FT" - where there were no adverts/graphics, but with the posting capabilities which archives don't offer. I'd readily pay $50 a year or so to help negate the impact of lost ad revenues.

Blackberry is a good choice ^

I've got one, plus XDA 2 and laptop with wi-fi/gprs card. I carry the laptop to most places I go but never go anywhere without the 'berry 'cause I'm an email junky! Don't really use it for web surfing though - few calls here and there and they're good quality too. Don't even use the XDA2 now as it doesn't really have a place in my technology life!

nevermind. I already decided.