For the more technically inclined I thought I'd expain how I have managed to update this journal whilst we've been in Argentina.

I used my PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), which is both a voice phone, data phone and camera phone. The model is an MDA III from T-Mobile, which is about two years old. It runs Windows Pocket PC operating system, whixh includes Pocket Word and Pocket Excel.

The MDA III was connected in Argentina to the Personal network via roaming with T-Mobile. This meant that there was a GPRS data connection pretty well wherever we went, and that it was possible to send email from the phone.

The Windows Live Spaces online journal was updated just by sending an email to a special Spaces address. This included photos as well.

The MDA III has a WiFi connection as well and it was possible to go into most cafés and get a free wireless connection. Both our hotels had free wireless connections, the one in Buenos Aires even had free Wifi in the room. This is in contrast to the UK, where Wifi is usually charged at GPB5 per hour. This meant that it was faster to download emails or browse the internet than with GPRS. The only drawback was that I was unable to send emails from the Wifi connections (SMTP problem), so I had to use GPRS which was charged to my UK T-Mobile monthly contract at GBP7.50 per megabyte. This worked out at about a pound a day, which was more than I'd planned, but worthwhile for the ability to be send updates from anywhere.

Future improvement will be to solve the problem of not being able to send emails from a Wifi connection (I have to use SMTP on the MDA III as the browser can’t support most webmail web sites). There do appear to be some Pocket PC webmail programs, but I may need to change my ISP. I am also experimenting with FTP programs, which will allow uploading of photographs.

Sorry, slipped into Engineer mode there. End of Geek-speak.


Update: I was always aware that the photos taken on my MDA III and stored on its SD storage card were vulnerable since the SD card could not be backed up. The PC's in the internet cafés did not have an SD card reader and I didn't take my USB to SD card reader, which would have allowed me to make a back up. Take a look at this link, which solves the SD card problem by making it dual use and allows you to plug it into a USB socket: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-images/B0009HTB0Y/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_all/104-5667015-0305531?ie=UTF8&s=electronics#gallery Is that cool or what!