Me and MYLO

Now back to gadgets and phones.

I do have the shopping gene, it just doesn't express itself very often for clothes, more often for shoes, and never for jewelry. Gadgets on, the other hand, are a very different story. That's where the gene kicks in.

When I tell my (male) friends that I have picked up this or that at Fry's or similar spots, they frequently pooh pooh this. I could get the same thing on line, through EBay or other places and this is true.

But they miss the point! Trying to browse for interesting discoveries on the internet is very unsatisfying for the most part. If I know what I want or need to do comparisons or other research, or watch for various announcements - that's another issue.

But for the thrill of discovery, there's nothing more satisfying than wandering the aisles of a big, chaotic store like Fry's.

What I love about Fry's is its disorganize nature. You can often find the same type of item in multiple areas of the store, at very different prices.

For example, a number of years ago I was looking into bluetooth USB fobs. In the section of the Palo Alto store closest to the computers, I found several and then found another cluster over by the wireless routers and memory cards for $20-30 less. Headsets in the Apple / iPhone section are quite pricy but the equivalent selections can be found in the audio aisle for less. And so on.

That was how I found the MYLO.

Connectivity in the Northeast Kingdom

I had a problem to solve at our place in Vermont. My family (both sides) come from there and both sides set up summer "camps" in Greensboro, in the Northeast Kingdom. I only spent summers there, but then my father moved back to live there permanently in the mid-90's and in 2000, my sister and her husband and I bought a "village house" suitable for living in during the non-summer months (September-May). The combination of wanting to spend more time with my father and being able to avoid freezing to death doing so, made the option of working from there very appealing.

But there was a problem. Actually, there were two problems: no high speed internet and no cell phone coverage.

As late as 1990, we still had a party line at the cottage. AT&T was the only long distance carrier and there was no direct long distance dial for us until the 1990s. This originally meant dialing 0 to place a call and then upleveled to allow us to dial the remote number but then required operator manual intervention to place the final connection. That has been remedied, but given that history, it should be no surprise that that there is still no cell phone coverage in this part of Vermont due to enormous local resistance to placing unsightly towers on the lovely hills.

This was a very understandable reaction, particularly when cell phones were viewed as the extravagant toys for part-time "Summer People" like me. But as time has gone on, cell phones have been come a critical part of business, safety, and communication for most people.

Someday this will be solved in our wonderful corner of the NE Kingdom. I can appreciate the issues and I'm still only a part-time resident. Meanwhile, I needed to figure out something else.

Unfortunately, we had no broadband either. No surprises there if you know the area. TV and radio reception are generally terrible with most channels coming from Quebec (keeps the French in shape). Satellite TV is more or less available but due to the rural environment, hills and trees sometimes make that unfeasible as well. DSL was only enabled very recently.

But finally, in 2005, a broadband carrier set up line-of-sight systems and we had broadband.

Some of the time.

A strong storm or wind would knock out service for days and even weeks at a time. The notion of technical service hadn't quite penetrated the mentality of this small, altruistic company. Calls went to voice mail and were rarely returned. Same for email, usually from home after you could send it.

Finally, Verizon provided DSL in 2008! Hurray!!! Even so, Verizon wasn't entire sure if we were covered or not. The previous system was faster but only when it was up. DSL has been as solid as a rock, if a good bit slower.

Meanwhile, I had been trying to solve the phone problem ever since we had first gotten our sporadic, unreliable broadband.

My sister works for IBM and I had started consulting for Cisco. We both needed telephone connections regularly and if my brother showed up or anyone wanted to call - like our father from his separate cottage - this became untenable.

Both Cisco and IBM provided VoIP options, but the connections were not (and still aren't) great running over DSL with VPN on top.

And remember - no cell phone coverage. Still no cell phone coverage.

I had already started using Skype, including Skype Out, in 2004 or so. And in Vermont, I found this worked better than Cisco's VoIP for clarity.

That was when I found the MYLO at Fry's where a returned package was on sale for under $200.

MY Life Online is another fascinating almost-ran technology from Sony. Think of it as an iPod Touch without many apps. It has a nice screen, a slideout keyboard, and a built in 802.11b capability along with web browsing, video, and music built in. And it has "communications" apps, including Skype.

Finally I had the equivalent of a cell phone in our cottage and our village house.

Subsequently, I bought several Skype phones (discovered at Fry's). One from Linksys connects via a bluetooth device to my computer and works great on my home computers where I have a faster network, but not as well in Vermont on DSL with VPN. The Belkin connects directly to the router and when I talk on this device I've been told I sound like I'm on a landline phone. But the volume is so low on my end that I can barely hear it even with amplification and it will not accept additional keypad entries after the initial call is connected, making it useless for work-related calls requiring navigation.

The MYLO remained my traveling friend right up to November, 2009. As far as I'm concerned, it's still a great little device that saved my working life for at least 4 years.

But all along, I wanted to just glue that thing to the back of my cell phone.

I also knew that the iPhone had a Skype app. The problem was that with Verizon, I could at least have cell coverage in Vermont right through Danville (historic home of my line of Bickfords, btw. There are a lot of my ancestors who ventured "west" from New Hampshire at the end of the Revolution buried in North Danville) only about 20-30 minutes away. AT&T dropped off somewhere in the White Mountains.

But my will power was waning. I soooo tired of hearing my friends say they LOVED their iPhones and I was tired of carrying at least two devices when I traveled to Vermont.

The crowning blow came with my trip to the UK. I couldn't use my Motorola Q there, even at $2 / minute or whatever outrageous fee Verizon would have charged. I looked into all sorts of unlocked and ToGo phones. Jonathan's lecture aside, I was so impressed by the voice quality of the simple phone I had with the ability to reload the ToGo SIM with minutes, that I knew the time had come.

Next Up: Susan gets a DROID AND an iPhone (OK, an iPod Touch).