Team System DevLab - Getting to Seattle and the advances in technology

So today we traveled from Amsterdam, The Netherlands to Seattle, Washington, USA. Because I have TomTom 5 as a navigation system, we thought it would be nice to have a map of the area.

Being an honest guy, I ordered a city map for Seattle WA from the TomTom website. TomTom offers those maps for download from their site. So I thought yesterday evening: Let's order that map and get it on my PDA.

The order process went well; credit card got accepted and so on. However, my order status didn't change until this morning, after we left from Amsterdam. So apparently, TomTom has no real STP system in place, but instead some people watching the order by hand and authorizing them…

We did not have a direct flight, but made a stop in Copenhagen, Denmark. So I thought I'd hook up my laptop to the wireless Internet and just download the map. This proved not to be so simple. As it turns out, after you order via a website, you have to download the city map directly via the Plus Services on your PDA, which is somewhat counterintuitive. Furthermore, in the mails they sent me, there was no explanation about how to get that map downloaded.

But luckily, I was able to find this out in time (before our Internet timeslot was up..). However getting my PDA connected to the internet was something else. The problem is that my old IPAQ 3970 does not have built-in WiFi and I couldn't put in my WiFi SDIO card, because then TomTom won't start. So I thought, let’s use Active Sync. Off course, I did not take the cradle with me, because I can sync wireless via Bluetooth. Nice idea, but for some strange reason, my Bluetooth did no longer seem to operate.

So my next try was to use Infrared. This also didn't work as using the IR did hang TomTom (maybe because of high CPU usage). One could think that I now was out of options. But this is not the case. My colleague Marcel also had his laptop with him, and his Bluetooth did function. We weren't there yet though… When you use a PDA via Bluetooth, a partnership should already be available, and off course, Marcel's laptop did not have a partnership with my PDA. You can however set up a partnership via IR. So we did that, and then connected via Bluetooth to ActiveSync. ActiveSync gave me internet access via wireless and in the end we managed to complete this whole ordeal well within the two-hour timeframe we had available.

We have now used the map to drive from the airport to the hotel using TomTom…

So one can see, all this cool functionality is available, but it isn't always as easy as it seems to get it to work.. (What about a *real* end user??)