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I took advantage of the GPRS features of my new phone today, as I killed time in the Chicago O'Hare airport. On the positive side, it's very very easy to use. I pop in my little Bluetooth USB widget, and "dial up" the connection via Internet Connect. I'm directly transfering data packets across AT&T's network to the Internet, so I don't have to have some other dial-up number to connect to (which I did have to have on Sprint's offering). The downside is that it's slow (not sure how slow yet, since I don't get a bps rating), and that it behaves poorly if there are many active network connections. The worst, though, is that AT&T bills by data transferred, and the best plan you can get still maxes out at 8MB. I chewed through about 1.5MB sitting in the airport, just trying to download some web pages and e-mail, so that's just embarassing.
Unfortunately, in this broadband environment we live in, a lot of apps are pretty greedy when it comes to the pipe. I love Safari, but it has no option for turning off image loading :). And using my client-based junk mail filter requires downloading all of the junk mail first -- d'oh!
(I almost got this posted from the airplane itself, but didn't have enough time before they made me put away my computer. And now I'm back on Plain Old Dialup. With any luck, though, I'll be helping the folks at this nice bed&breakfast install a new Airport Extreme tomorrow, so I'll be living large again.) 8:36:02 PM () 
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