When I asked for questions, I was that this one wouldn’t come up. Here’s the deal: there will be some content below the question. That content will contain some answers, but the complete absence of reason is not my fault.

I have an iPhone question. I am moving from the UK to NZ in January. I will be living in Te Anau in Southland. I want to get an iphone 3Gs (16GB) but wonder if there will be any problems with reception down there. Will I end up frustrated by not being able to use the phone to its potential? Also do I really have to pay an extra charge to use the internet as much as I would like? I had an older model iPhone here and am used to paying 45GBP per month for unlimited internet, etc. on my iPhone. All I really want is to be able to check and send emails with attachments as much as I like, mainly to send and receive photos/videos. I will use it as a phone, but not much. I will surf net, but not much. Although that may change if I figure out facebook. Thanks. Emma

On Carriers and Coverage

First up, you have two (main) choices of carrier for your iPhone in New Zealand: Vodafone and Telecom XT. Vodafone is the only official carrier. The iPhone will work on Telecom, but you risk things not working perfectly – tethering for example doesn’t currently work on iPhone OS 3.1 and above.

The sad thing is that Telecom’s XT network is arguably a better choice for using 3G data on the iPhone. In order to understand coverage you need to check my original post on what frequencies each network uses. For the iPhone, you’re looking at the left and right columns in the table. You can see that Vodafone provides 3G data coverage for the iPhone in main centres only.

If you check Vodafone’s coverage map, the iPhone 3G coverage is shown when you tick the red “3G Broadband” option. You can see that Te Anau, Invercargill, and Bluff are pretty much the only coverage areas in Southland. The “3G Broadband Extended” option uses frequencies that the iPhone doesn’t operate on. Of course you’ll still be able to make calls and get a 2G data connection pretty much anywhere you care to travel.

Telecom’s XT 3G coverage on the other hand looks a hell of a lot more comprehensive.

So it’s a hard call: patchy 3G coverage but full phone support with Vodafone, or great 3G coverage with patchy phone support on Telecom. My suggestion would be to try Vodafone first to see if you have good coverage in Te Anau, and perhaps switch to Telecom if it’s not working for you.

On Plans and Pricing

Firstly: there is no such thing as an “unlimited” plan in New Zealand. Full Stop. The only thing that comes close it is Telecom’s $12TXT plan, that allows “unlimited” SMS messages (within the bounds of an “acceptable use policy”) as a $12 add on to your account.

For comparing Vodafone and Telecom plans, here is a nice Google spreadsheet that was put together recently.

For 45GBP, or about $100 NZD, you’re slap bang in the middle of Vodafone’s iPhone $80 and $130 plans. The key difference for you is that iPhone $80 comes with 250MB of data, and $130 gets you 500MB.

Both carriers seem to be settling on 250MB as a “reasonable” data cap for basic plans, but Vodafone has upped that to 3GB temporarily (currently till the end of November). I’m crossing my fingers that we’ll get a decent bump in “reasonable” data once that 3GB offer finishes. 250MB is ok, but it’s certainly not enough that you will be able to “check and send emails with attachments as much as [you] like, mainly to send and receive photos/videos”.

Another option is to go with a “standard” non-iPhone plan, and add Vodafone’s $50 1GB data add-on. But you’d need to pay full-price for your iPhone. Confused yet?

In Conclusion

In summary, New Zealand’s reputation as a backwater is unfortunately confirmed when it comes to smart-phone data pricing. Vodafone’s experimentation with 3GB limits is honourable, but ultimately probably a bait-and-switch attempt for a premium-priced data plan. It’s all about supply and demand. We just don’t have the population density to support pricing similar to the UK.

Popularity: 15% [?]

The question antenna has received a transmission:

Morning I have a 597e Air card, which I use as my only means of connection as I am not on a landline, here. I see it has a socket for a extension aerial, Orb has no knowledge of any device can you advise me please? Looking at the data on the dropdown its running at 115.2 Kbps Just wondering if I can get better reception somehow? Thanks a lot..

This question has so many components to it, I barely know where to start, but let’s take a crack at it.

First: the 597e. Here’s a handy datasheet [pdf link] that tells us all about the Sierra Wireless 597e. Excitingly, it’s capable of 3.1Mbps download speeds. The sad thing is that this is entirely dependent on the network. Telecom’s CDMA (not XT) network in this case. Before you go grabbing an antenna, there are a bunch of things to consider:

• Are there heaps of other cellular data users in your area? Cell networks have much higher contention rates than regular landlines. Even a handful of users downloading data from the same cell site will slow data speeds noticably for all users of that cell.
• How far away is your nearest cell site? An antenna may help, but if you’re too far away, it’s not going to help much.
• Does your local cell site even support EV-DO Rev A? Or is it still using an older, slower data standard? The only way to find out would be to ask Telecom.
• Is your computer fooling you? Sometimes a modem will report a speed of 115.2 Kbps by default, when the actual modem speed is much higher. Try a site like SpeedTest.net to see what sort of real-world download speeds you are getting.

Now on to antennas, or aerials. A quick Google tells me that the 597e comes with an SMB antenna socket. I’m pretty sure that’s a standard socket for most car kits, so it might be worth asking about a “car kit antenna”, or find an expert and ask for a cell phone antenna with an SMB plug. If local suppliers can’t help you out, you could always import an aerial and connector from an international retailer like these guys or those ones.

If you’re extremely keen on something cheap and cheerful, remember that an antenna is nothing more than an exposed piece of wire. If you use an antenna calculator, you can see that even the full-wavelength size of a 1900MHz antenna is only about 6 inches. You could grab an SMB plug, connect it to some coaxial cable, then strip the last 6 inches off the cable to expose the conductor. Voila! An antenna! Of course the pro antennas come with base loads and boosters and all sorts of good stuff which makes them better than bare wire, but it might be worth a crack for a really cheap boost.

Good luck!

Popularity: 5% [?]

I opened the question laptop and besides warming my lap, it presented the following question to me:

I need help! Need a new laptop, my last one Toshiba Satellite M40 just died. Don’t know the tech stuff but need to store lots of photos plus run a small business (word and excel work mainly). Thinking of getting Toshiba P300 oc2. 500GB HD and 4GD DDR2 memory. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks for your help.

I could just make up and answer and tell you to buy a Toshonic XS234.5 Revision 4 Model S with a 523GB HDD and 3GB Dance Dance Revolution, but I’d be doing neither of us a favour.

The truth is, I get variations on the “Which Laptop/PC/Phone?” question fairly regularly, and there is no correct answer. The huge diversity of consumer electronics poses at least an NP-Hard problem in selecting the ‘correct’ device. I’d argue in fact that the problem is bordering on chaos.

There is, thankfully, a correct process for purchasing a device that will get you over the 80/20 barrier very quickly. That is, you will be able to discard 80% of the available options, or select a device that is 80% appropriate, in short order.

Step 1: Set your budget.
Look, I know I sound like your father, but just bloody do it, and stick to it. If you don’t set a budget, you’ll flounder around for days and end up selecting something too expensive anyway.

Step 2: Decide on some non-negotiables.
Can you work on anything smaller than a 15″ screen? Do you require at least 300GB of photo storage, plus 100GB for the OS and sundries? Are you a Mac zealot? Do you require at least 4 USB ports to power all your humping dogs?

You get the picture. If there are any utterly non-negotiable items in your requirements, note them down and stick to them. In some cases this may require collaboration with Step 1. You may for example find no 17″ laptops that fit within your predefined budget. Go smaller or set your budget higher.

Taking the original question, this guy probably needs to prioritise disk space over CPU and RAM. Unless you’re doing hardcore Photoshop work on those images, any modern laptop will load images and run Word/Excel. If it were me, I’d go for decent internal storage, and probably even drop back on the CPU/RAM requirements and use the savings to buy an external backup device for the photos too.

Step 3: Google, Grasshopper.
Trawl the manufacturer sites for devices that fit your parameters in Steps 1 and 2, then make a list of models. Take that list and spend a good couple of hours Googling for reviews and opinions. What you’re looking for here is not “oh my god this is the shizzle fo my nizzle!” reviews. You’re looking for a groundswell of “what the hell, my battery exploded”-type messages. Some devices are lemons, and the internet discovers those lemons very, very quickly.

Step4: Purchase, then take a timeout.
Ben’s Consumer Electronics Law:

When an electronic device is purchased, a device with additional capability is instantaneously created at the same price point.

You’ve found the device that is a close match to your requirements and fits in your budget. Buy it. Savour it. Don’t keep looking for alternatives that “could have been”. You’re guaranteed to be disappointed.

Popularity: 10% [?]

The question device has raised an interrupt:

I have no audio device installed on my Toshiba, and I don’t know where to download one from without having to buy/register for a driver software app.

Can you help? I get hear alert noises, just no audio noise.

Firstly, like any annoying geek, I must raise a clarification. There are devices, and there are device drivers.

The device is the physical piece of hardware inside your machine. It might be a plugged-in expansion card, or it might be a set of chips soldered into the motherboard. Either way, most of these devices are relatively inert in the absence of a device driver. The operating system (e.g. Windows or Linux), may be able to make basic requests of the device (e.g. draw unaccelerated 640×480 video), but it usually cannot use the advanced features of the device without the correct driver.

Basically, the device driver tells the operating system where to poke the device, and with what sized stick.

So, having got that out of the way, I’m hoping that you’re missing merely a device driver, and not an entire device.

Read more…

Popularity: 3% [?]

The question machine has broadcast an unencrypted signal as follows:

Where the hell did wireless access points go? I have a non wireless router and a separate 1GB switch and I want to buy a WAP to bung on my network, but the word wireless now seems to be permanently attached to the word router. I want to buy a WAP for like $40 but I can only buy it with another $40 worth of router stuck on it. But I have a router? What happens to people who want to extend wireless to the back of the property with a lan cable? do they put a redundant router there too, all flaccid and pointless? Or people like me who already have a router that works? Do I need to buy one of them funny airports from apple? Or am I a dinosaur and all the kids these days like to have a network in a box? Thanks?

Brother, come close, I have a secret to tell you. Since the earliest days of electronics, technicians – pushed by their marketing department slave-masters – have been integrating more and more functions into the same devices. At one stage they were so in awe of their integration, they actually labelled it Very Large Scale Integration. If they knew then what we know now, they would not have gone so far up the superlative scale so early. Perhaps Extra Large, leaving room for multiple XXLs later, before moving on to Very?

We are approaching the apogee of that integration, and it is apparent in today’s consumer electronics. I believe that what you see as a Wireless Router, is in fact a box with an antenna wrapped around a single chip. The “Wireless” part of the equation has become commoditised into pointlessness. There is simply no value in creating it separately from the router. I’d go far as to guess that if you were to find a box labelled “WAP”, it would have the same chip in it, and simply lack the software to control the “router” bit.

I’m not being entirely facetious. Have you opened up a regular-sized DVD player lately? Between the power supply, the DVD platter, and the single-chip decoder/amplifier, there is enough space to house an entire Asian sweatshop to produce more of the very same DVD players. This is because the entire functionality of a DVD player – including surround sound and horrific bouncing-logo screensaver – is on about three chips.

Of course you can still find true Wireless Access Points like this one. Heck you could even pay $2,700 for the privilege of outdoor wifi (or you could bung a large aerial on your $50 indoor access point and put it next to a window).

Popularity: 6% [?]