My trip through Canada has turned into more of a fact finding mission than anything else. Sure I'm doing the planned business and socializing but I'm also learning a ton about things I didn't know I didn't know about.

First of all, apparently due to drug advertising regulations a manufacturer can run ads with the name of the drug they are selling so long as they don't mention what it does. This makes for some extremely weird ads - like the one I saw before Superbad in a theater in Toronto. This particular ad was a solid 60 seconds of young girls jumping around and trying on clothes and the voice over saying something about "being your own person" or some crap. I couldn't figure out what it was for to save my life, turns out it was for birth control. There have got to be some insane advertising meetings specing these things out.

Also, if you have a mobile phone and want to use it for any kind of mobile Internet kind of things you are pretty much screwed. As far as I can tell there's no such thing as an all inclusive data plan in the whole of Canada and the providers are totally stoked on bending over the entire country. My US issued CDMA phone works here no problem - for voice, but won't connect to any kind of data network. This is possibly because data costs something like a hundred bucks a MB or so and therefore the networks have them super locked down. Sorry Canada.



Speaking of mobile phones, the folks over at Rogers have put in what might be the flat out stupidest feature I've ever seen. They offer the Sony Ericksson W810i Walkman Phone which, as you might guess from the name, is set up to play music. In fact it has tons of built in music playing software, which lets you play MP3s and things. Well, the smartalics over there at Rogers decided to hijack the "end call" button and make it connect, rather slowly I might add, to their own DRM filled music store instead. This is going to be especially interesting to follow, as Rogers is slotted to release the iPhone later this year.

Finally, not so much something I learned but a learning experience... I was walking down Queen West when I saw a store window display filled with a ton of books a good friend of mine had written. I instantly started smiling and pulled out my camera and started snapping photos of the window so I could show her later. This was all well and good until I noticed people inside looking at me rather oddly, and then processed that my friend Violet writes sex manuals, and the store was a sex book/toy shop, and the books in the window were giving/getting head, fetishes, and generally getting it on and I probably looked like a total creep. Luckily the staff was very understanding when I went inside to try and explain myself.

And yes, I just used the word "staff" in a paragraph about a sex shop.

"Yes, that's right, one phone has SMS only, one phone has EVDO only, neither have voice, though both are linked to the same account..."



It was 1am and I was sitting in a hallway on a payphone at JFK, having just landed from flight starting many hours earlier in Los Angeles. I was using the payphone to call into an 800 line, a conference call number the tech guys had set up moments earlier for me so I could actually speak to someone and try and get an idea what the hell was going on with my phones. And to make it that much more interesting, prior to this call we'd been communicating almost exclusively through Facebook - as I was able to use the mobile features through my one device that EVDO was working with.

They'd shipped me the new phone a few days earlier to check out some new features on it but all hell had broken loose when I tried to add it to my account. Rather than just transferring the services to the new device, it had split them between two devices, losing some along the way. No one involved in any level of the problem solving had ever seen anything like that before. I'd just finished reading 'Crooked Little Vein' on the flight and was wondering just how much of the protagonist's shit for luck had rubbed off on me.

"Crazy how missing this one communications link feels so debilitating..."

That's what one of the guys said half way through the chaos and it got me thinking. One link? How about the only link!

My problem previously was having too many communications options. I had several phone numbers, countless e-mails addresses, and a handful of SNS accounts that I used regularly. Every second I was checking something else, and consolidation has been a major effort in reducing that. I now have one phone number and all e-mail and SNS accounts forward to my gmail account so I only have one thing to check. And I have that all running to one mobile device. This is great for having less to worry about, but clearly there were other problems I hadn't thought about. What happens when the link to that one place where all of your communication is going on breaks? How much redundancy is too much is just good planning?

Tim Ferriss has talked about how much time we spend trying to make sure problems don't arise, much more time than it would actually take to put out those fires as they pop up. No longer worrying about preventing things from going wrong frees you up a lot of time to do other, non-worrying kinds of things but sitting on that sitting on that airport floor juggling several devices and trying to take step by step reprogramming directions from the support on the other end of the payphone - i was kind of wishing I'd taken a few extra precautions. But what would those even be? Having two phones with independent service is kind of insane. And I see a psychotherapist on a weekly basis so I'm pretty comfortable saying that.

The problem was finally isolated and corrected so I only had to skate around this crazy situation for about 48 hours but still has me questioning things. How much do you rely on a single device? How would you cope if all the sudden that stopped working? What parts of your life would be unaffected, and what parts would need serious readjusting?

(photo by seanaes )

This week I'm writing in from the SG Tokyo field office on an all expense paid trip to research the future of communication and global interconnectivity. OK, that's not entirely the truth, I am in Japan but that's about where the line to fiction starts blurring. A guy can dream can't he? Actually I am kind of researching communication but with a much more "how the crap do I stay in touch with my friends" approach rather than the "what does the future hold" perspective. Turns out it's both easier and harder than I expected.

If you've been following my columns here you know I'm kind of obsessed with communication to begin with and during ordinary daily life in Los Angeles I prefer IM and SMS to the phone, but would rather get a call then an e-mail. In planning this trip I knew a good bit of that was going to be thrown into an uproar, but was also excited to see what tools people I'd be hanging out with in Japan were using and how they were using them. Everyone I talked to prior to the trip said renting a mobile phone from a kiosk at the airport upon arrival was essential, so I assumed the bulk of contact would be SMS based and arranged for a phone to use during my trip.



Additionally I was curious how I'd stay in touch with my friends in the states. I've also got a friend from LA who is in Thailand right now and thanks T-Mobile she has free SMS coverage there which made contacting her from LA no problem, but a bit trickier from Japan where it's no longer a local number to send or receive from. How would all this play out?

Not surprisingly some contact forms didn't change at all, minor time zone differences aside. I could IM and e-mail with people the same as always. Site messaging (like mail here on SG) also worked the same as always and was really helpful. Voice to the states wasn't that tricky so long as I had a laptop thanks to several VOIP options. For a very small per minute fee I can use things like Gizmo Project or Skype to call any phone number on the planet. I can also sent SMS messages with Skype to US numbers for about $0.12 each, but people can't reply back to those. Both of those services also let you make calls to other people using them for free. You can also flex your inner nerd with gaming options like Teamspeak if you already use that, but I wouldn't recommend trying to set it up just for a trip.



As for in country communication, it's not SMS at all. In fact no one I know here is using SMS for anything. This doesn't mean they aren't using their mobile phones, they are - all the time actually - but instead all messaging is e-mails (or mobile mail) directly to the phones. This seems to skirt some kind of high SMS charge in some way. This is amusing actually because originally SMS gained popularity in many countries because it was much cheaper than voice calls. Interestingly enough nanoblogging service Twitter is benefiting here as well because of the mobile and direct messaging options. You can't use SMS for it, but you can use your mobile phone's browser and send direct messages through twitter to friends here in Japan (or anywhere in the world) for free. Several people I've talked to are doing this, as well as just keeping an eye on the mobile page to see where their friends are. Twitter actually solved the issue for my friend in Thailand. While it's not as direct as an SMS that she can reply to her from Los Angeles, we can still keep in touch easily and basically for free.

This is the trick, almost every single person I've seen has a phone, and it's usually out in being held in one hand and stared at. People on the trains, people on the streets, everyone. Conversely, I can probably count on one hand the number of people I've seen talking on their phones, and I'm including myself in that number. To add to that, there are signs everywhere prohibiting you from talking on your phone, so much of the text based mobile usage might stem from that as well. There are also pay phone booths everywhere but I haven't seen a single one being used yet which is certainly tied into the mobile aspect. If people aren't using their mobile phones to talk on, who might someone call from a pay phone? I've heard these are slowly disappearing as well, much the way they are in the US.



What does all this mean? It just means the way we communicate with each other, those next to us and on the other side of the world, is constantly evolving. I can't wait to see where we go next from here.

In the fashion conscious world of mobile phones Chocolate is in. In a move to compete against Moto's new KRZR K1m (an updated RAZR), LG is launching a Chocolate flip phone. With a sexy sleek black exterior, dual screens, blood red touch-sensitive music controls, and more features than a pocket knife (Bluetooth 2.0, 1.3 Megapixel camera, microSD, Media player) this phone should fly off shelves just as quickly as its slider styled older sister. According to Engadget, LG should be launching the phone in about a month for Verizon Wireless subscribers.

So grab a sexy black one before they offer a pink model right before Christmas for all the Barbies and Kens.


Via Engadget