By Joseph Mercola, D.O.
Prior to last Christmas I did about 10 hours of research to determine the best cell phone out there, and it seemed to a shame to waste the information so I wrote an article about the best cell phones I found.
The article details a Samsung S105 with T Mobile service as my choice primarily due to an excellent discount offered by Amazon. After the Amazon discount disappeared it seemed that the Samsung A500 phone with Sprint service was a better choice, and I will explain why.
I read hundreds of posts about the phone that people had submitted to various sites, and I learned from a few of them that the Sprint Vision service allows the phone to be used as a high-speed wireless modem.
This was not apparently obvious as in November of last year Sprint formally "discontinued" this service--it is not in any of their current marketing materials. Sprint decided they did not want to let the world know about it yet and stopped selling the data cable that connects the cell phone to the USB port in your computer.
Their service still worked, but they decided to increase their profits and offer a PCMCIA card for $300 and charge users $100 a month for unlimited wireless service.
This is not nearly as good a deal as buying the outstanding Samsung A500 phone for $200 at Costco and paying $35 a month for cell phone service and $10 a month for unlimited Vision service that connects you to the Net.
The only problem is that the Samsung phone requires a data cable. This is where eBay comes to the rescue--if you type in ‘Samsung data cable’ on eBay you will find many vendors that sell the cable and the software to connect to the Internet.
I dug deeper and found that Sprint’s Vision service is the forerunner of 3G service, which offers high-speed Internet access. The current implementation though is actually 2.5 and does not yet fully access the high bandwidth potential of 3G.
However, the Vision 2.5G service is faster than anything that is currently available in the United States as I routinely connect at speeds of 150 to 170K. This is three to six times faster than a standard dialup connection.
The neat thing about this though is that it is wireless. I can’t tell you the thrill I had the first time I used this setup. I was in a shuttle in Orlando riding from the airport to a hotel and was able to connect to the Net and check my e-mail. It was awesome.
I can’t tell you how happy I was to find this solution as I frequently travel and require constant Net connection. It is nearly always a challenge to connect to the Net in hotels so I was delighted to have this option.
I was able to confirm that the modem worked when I went to Maui earlier this year and used it as my exclusive Net connection. My brother trades commodities in Chicago and has a one-hour train ride every morning. I was able to hook him up with the service, and now he trades on the train and is able to spend more time with his family. Needless to say, he is one happy camper, and so are his kids as they now have more time with their dad.
I was very excited about this technique and really wanted to share it with everyone, but I was concerned that if more people knew about it Sprint would shut the service off and I would lose my connection.
Well earlier this week Slashdot posted an article on this high-speed, wireless Internet connection. Many people have never heard of Slashdot, but it is a very popular tech site that has two orders of magnitude more traffic than my own site. So the cat is officially out of the bag, and I can share my secret.
Before you go rushing out to purchase the phone though, there are two major downsides of the modem.
The first one is that you won’t be able to download your e-mail unless you are a programmer. I was in Maui with my chief programmer, Jon Rentzch, and hacked a port bridge to his server for me that allowed me to have full function with my e-mail.
But even with his hack the connection is somewhat flaky, and I frequently have to reconnect to get my e-mail to work.
The other downside is that while the 2.5G service is much faster than dialup, it has a long latency. This is partially due to the phone constantly hanging up and redialing. So the end result is that the connection winds up being not much different than dialup.
However, you still have the major convenience of having a wireless Net connection. If Wi-Fi were more common and available, it would certainly be a better choice. But in the meantime, for $10 a month unlimited wireless Internet connection is one of the best bargains out there.
Let’s hope Sprint keeps the service running.