By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

On a recent trip to Manhattan, I had the chance to try out the wireless connectivity of my new HP Pocket PC iPaq 4355. Every chance I had, I would produce it, turn it on and see if there were any wireless networks available. The first try was at the Tampa airport—nothing. The second try was at the JetBlue terminal at JFK in New York. A banner advertised free wireless connectivity provided in the terminal by JetBlue, but there was no way my family was going to let me pause for more than a moment on the way to baggage claim. Then at baggage claim I had to scan for our bags, then catch a cab, and then the opportunity was gone.

Once in the hotel, there were two wireless connections listed as available—but they really weren’t since they didn’t allow connections. While walking around the Upper West Side there were always several connections listed as available, but almost none would let you in. This was a far cry from what I had read several years back when wireless routers first became widely available and articles were written about how easy it was to cruise the streets and sidewalks of Manhattan and find a place to connect to the Internet. In the ensuing time, people apparently have learned how to secure their wireless networks and have no interest in sharing a connection with strangers.

In reverse order in which I encountered them in my walks in various parts of the city in the next paragraph is a list of the names of wireless networks I encountered. Of these, only Terrace, Columbia University, the two Bryant Park ones and the one named default let me on. The Bryant Park ones required a sign on from a web page, and I didn’t have time to do it, though. The default one, which was at or near a McDonald’s on Broadway was OK for email but didn’t provide enough bandwidth for viewing web pages with my laptop (I went to the hotel for my laptop in the hope of doing some serious work once I had discovered the connection with the iPAQ). T-Mobile available at Starbucks costs around $30/month or $.10/minute with a 60 minute minimum session in Manhattan. I think the charge in Tampa is less than that.

Default, NetGear, META_NYC_WLA…., Bleeker3, Mfo010, NY Amsterdam, NETGEARH, Moazami, 3CWireless, Stacy Lyn Giunta, Gur, tmobile, Verizon Wi-Fi, fa1779zvpo, NYSAK, BP-PKRR, Bryantpark.org, TOMMYB, Emgott, Columbia University, Terrace, MAX-BG, Elinkdsl, Marianne Wireless, Wireless, SkyLan_Interent

Some of the networks, like SkyLan_Internet and Verizon Wi-Fi, would popup in many parts of the city.

Bryant Park, http://www.bryantpark.org/, deserves special mention. It was one of the first places in the country, I think, to provide an outdoor wireless hotspot to anyone who comes to the park with a wireless device. You can read a description and see how to connect when there at http://www.bryantpark.org/amenities/wireless.php.

It was interesting to see all these people in the park staring into laptops along with the signs admonishing people to be quiet in this section of the park. It was almost like being in a library reading room. Indeed, Bryant Park is located behind the main branch of the New York City Library between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) and between 40^th Street and 42^nd Street.

So why can’t Tampa have something like Bryant Park? First of all, Tampa is really short on parks. Our city fathers of many years past saw fit to let Tampa develop with very few parks. There is a nice small park, Kate Jackson, in my Hyde Park neighborhood that has been recently renovated; it contains a small area with benches and paths among the shrubbery that is fairly isolated from the more noisy areas and, I think, would be a good candidate for such a hot spot. I am sure others can produce candidates in their neighborhoods. And, of course, there is Lykes Gaslight Square in downtown.

Speaking of my neighborhood, I decided to walk a bit of it to search for hotspots. I found a lot. Apparently wireless routers are everywhere. I found in excess of 30 and did not walk past more than 60% of the 400 houses in the neighborhood. I think about 10 let me connect and, of those, six gave me a connection to the Internet.

Back to Manhattan The Vindigo subscription I purchased for the Pocket PC again helped me to find restaurants in Manhattan, but I miss the Zagat reviews and ratings that were in it several years back. Now, instead of Zagat reviews you get reviews from the New York Times that may be over four years old. I think Zagat went out and created their own paid subscription service. The shopping information and maps in Vindigo are also of use. And I can load restaurant, shopping and entertainment information for as many cities as I like from Vindigo under my one year subscription. So far, I have only added Tampa. Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any reviews for the Tampa restaurants, and some restaurants that have been closed for more than a year are still listed.

If you are interested in using the subway while in New York, there is an excellent program for the Pocket PC called Tube New York that provides current schedule information on all the lines, a map of the lines and a trip calculator that figures your route for a starting station and an ending station. It will then do an animated simulation of the trip on the route map. The version of the program I have also includes an overlay map of the streets of Manhattan from about 50th Street south. The route maps cover the entire system.

Email problems Once you have lucked out and found a wireless connection that will let you on, you want to check your email. Well, before the trip, I set up an email account in Pocket Outlook on the iPAQ for my RoadRunner email account. It worked fine in my house on its wireless network. When I first tried to send and receive using it on the trip, I received an error message to the effect that I could not send. I should have known that would happen, since all ISPs that I know of will not relay email messages sent over another ISP’s network. I needed to be using RoadRunner if I wanted to send a message using my RoadRunner account.

I then had two options. I could try to use RoadRunner’s web mail or I could use an email account I created on the server that hosts my web site. It will accept messages originating from other domains since it requires authentication.

Well, it turns out that if I try to use RoadRunner’s web mail using the Pocket PC’s Pocket Internet Explorer program, I can enter my username and password, but then I go nowhere. If I try to setup an email account on the Pocket PC in Pocket Outlook, I run into the problem that the smtp server part only allows me to use the same username and password that the incoming part uses. And for some perverse reason the lamartin.com email setup requires that smtp precedes your incoming username in its smtp setup. So there is no way to set up my lamartin.com email to both send and receive. And just like RoadRunner, if I try to access my lamartin.com account via their web mail Internet page I get nowhere. In their case, I get a Java error.

When I returned to Tampa I contacted RoadRunner and the host for my website. I found that RoadRunner did not provide a special page for Pocket PCs to access for web mail, but MyHosting.com, my web host, did provide a special page that worked with Pocket PCs where I could send and receive my lamartin.com email.

That got me to thinking. Why not create a page of my own at my web site that would allow the sending of email from the pocket PC. Web sites have the ability to send emails using their own server. I did that--but I am not going to give out the URL here since I don’t want the whole world sending emails from my web site.

That got me to thinking some more. Why not create a web service at my site to send such emails that could be accessed from a program that I wrote for the Pocket PC. And I did just that. I wrote the web service that resides at my site. And I now have a program that I wrote using Visual Studio .Net and installed on the Pocket PC to send emails. So on my next trip to the big city, I will be able to send emails with no problem once I find a wireless connection.

In closing, it would be nice if there were some sort of universal wireless service travelers could subscribe to that could be used in airport terminals, hotels, coffee shops, etc. Now if you are lucky enough to find a for-profit service in such an establishment, say, at a Starbucks, it is not going to be the same service you find down the street at a McDonald’s or at the airport. And few of us want to pay for wireless connectivity—especially more than one service. u