Last week I took a trip from New York down to North Carolina and used the Boost Motorola i455 and mologogo for mobile net and vehicle tracking. I'm reporting on my results here. (BTW, if anyone wants to set up quickly,
go to mologogo's store and buy the whole kit for as little at $59.99 USD. They also sell the data cable for under $10.
The Good
It costs a mere 35 cents US a day, or about $10 a month for the data plan. There are no limitations to the amount of data.
It works. It really actually works. The tracking software is dead simple to use once you've loaded it on your phone. You launch the mologogo java app and forget about it. I've attached a screenshot from my tracking page that shows the trip as recorded by the mologogo service. You can see that there are periods when either there were no reports due to spotty coverage or the app wasn't running but as far as figuring out where I was, it works. To see this page live, go
here.
The cell modem also works. I logged on and checked email, weather, and traffic as we moved along. The connection only dropped a single time and was by and large rock steady from a modem standpoint.
I used Goops to implement Google Earth tracking on a Dell Latitude Piece-O-Crap(tm) 600 from work. It worked well for the most part. However, the laptop would periodically freeze up and require a reboot. I'm almost certain that this is a Google Earth problem, or more specifically, a Dell hardware issue when using GE than a Goops or modem issue.
In general, GE was able to download the road and map data quickly enough to make it a usable nav solution. There were a few times when I would drive off of the road and out onto a blurry background but since I'd also used GE to plot out directions, I had a purple line showing me where I ought to be and in just a few minutes the cell modem would catch up to where I was and restore the proper labels and terrain data and so forth. I'd use it again as a primary nav product.
The Bad
There's a reason that there are no limitations to the amount of data. The modem is slow. As in sloooooowwwwwwwwww. When coverage is good, I was able to load pages at
www.wunderground.com in reasonably good time -perhaps 1-2 minutes. When it was poor, it could take 10 minutes to get a page or worse, Firefox would time out because it got no response from the server. In all cases, simply driving a bit farther and trying again would fix it.
There were no cases where I simply wasn't able to make a connection after some time. However, it should be obvious that audio and video are out of the question. RSS feeds might make the whole setup snappier.
The Ugly
There's no ugly from my standpoint. Well, I guess that I haven't been able to iDen enable the phone yet, so all of my comments are based on use of the cell modem at a very low speed. I thought I'd enabled iDen but since there isn't any iDen service where I live I can't really tell if it is enabled or not.
Also, if you receive a call, mologogo suspends and you have to reactivate the program. This includes when you get a voice mail notification. Occasionally, the application will hang and stop updating your position. It isn't always clear about when this happens but it seems to occur when it has trouble downloading data for the onscreen map for awhile. Restarting the app fixes the problem.
The Verdict
For a cheapskate like me, the $10 a month price tag outweighs slow net access. I love having both net and tracking in the car, but then again, a lot of people don't want others to know where either they or their car is. Obviously if someone can look up your car location, they can find it and steal stuff out of your car. Since my system is dockable and I remove it from the car when I'm not in it, I don't worry too much about it.
The Boost solution works for both me and my car because I rarely talk on the phone and I don't text people on it. It's strictly an emergency phone or a way for my wife to find out "Where you at?!". Thus, it provides an ultra cheap phone service plus a modest data capability, which is exactly what I wanted.