Use http://wap.google.com/ to view PM, especially to view raw chat messages.

To send chatter, use raw just_chat but not via google (google's WAP gateway simply throws away the contents of forms), though you'll have to log in first. I just use ?op=login;user=x;passwd=y (not via google) to get a cookie into my phone.

For reading your private messages (/msg), I currently don't have a good solution (but I don't read mine frequently so I'm not surprised).

I'm in Silicon Valley. We used to have the Ricochet wireless service, which allowed one to work while mobile (i.e., actually moving). It was sort of like a cell system, and would hand you off between sites. A friend who commuted on the train between San Jose and San Francisco used it, but found that he couldn't keep a steady connection. It was better suited for off-line composition, and a quick connect-and-send when the train pulled into a station. Unfortunately, that service never figured out how to pay for itself, and folded.

I'm wireless at home, and my favorite local coffee shop is wireless. I usually works great, though some portable (not cell!) phones share the same frequency band as 802.11(b). I can tell when my neighbor is on the phone because my service degrades.

Friends who travel have ponied up the bucks to use the wireless services that Starbucks provides, since there are Starbucks everywhere. They're generally happy with it, since it lets them connect from most major airports.

I have two friends who try to connect through their cellphones, but they usually fall back onto something that actually works.

I don't know anyone who does any serious connectivity with anything smaller than a laptop. I occassionally see someone with a wired iPaq, but that's rare.

IE on PocketPC will work much better on regular HTML websites (as long as it has no frames).

Of course, a WML page will work best on a WAP browser. Incidentally, some WAP pages are designed such that it can be converted to both WML and voice (using e.g. Nuance) more conveniently.

Textarea is really not something expected on WAP. It's impossible to display on a tiny cell phone screen. And it's hard to translate correctly a long voice message into text.

High speed wireless data access is still too expensive in general. It's like calling international long distance or worse. Ricochet was very good. Too bad it went out of business.

________________
Update: Oh, Palm also uses its own invention to browse the Web. Kind of a hybrid between Palm database/application object and HTML, like a downloadable or downloaded webpage. I think it's best for data retrieval, not too way communication.

Now, if they would have WiFi on the train, that would be a different thing altogether. ;-)

I wonder if anyone has made a mail feed for new nodes from the Monastery?

Liz

When we have to travel, we can try to persuade IT to loan us a mobile phone card. When in Belgium it works quite well, with reasonable speed, but outside of Belgium it is generally too slow to do anything useful on WWW, unless you have text only pages.

You might ask why inside Belgium the card works so much faster? It turned ou that with the Belgian provider (Base) the card opened three connections simultaneously, thus speeding things up quite well (and of course tripling the connection costs at the same time).

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

Leonid Mamtchenkov aka TVSET

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

I could successfully login, read and even post answers, but postings were really rare.

Most pleasant of all this was availability of Perl on my PocketPC that I used to compile by myself and starting from that moment I put binaries at perlce.sourceforge.net. Now I have also Tcl::Tk and can use it from perl as well.

It's very handy to, when waiting for something, just pick perl out from pocket and play a bit with it...

Courage, the Cowardly Dog
Hehehehhehehe...................
:):):)