I just bought a prepaid data package from Claro, one of the three mobile telcos here in Chile. After fumbling with their settings (their APN for prepago banda ancha is bap.clarochile.cl, not bam.clarochile.cl) I've just completed a successful call with my Teliax account on my Nokia E71 to my Vonage account. The chain involved goes something like this:

Nokia SIP call -> Claro 3.5G network -> internet cloud to the US -> Vonage -> more internet cloud back to Chile -> Tutopia DSL -> Cisco ATA 186 -> Philips VOIP841 wireless phone (for whom Vonage is my "landline", I also have Skype running on it).

There's probably 20,000 miles worth of roundtrip involved, with data packets going through air, copper and fiber. Try to visualize it.

Quick notes on apps I'm using with my E71 smartphone:

• Nimbuzz and Fring because (unless I'm being really dense here), Skype Mobile doesn't support free skype-to-skype calls over WiFi. I'm using Teliax as an SIP provider. (This would give me a cheap option on the move, as well as a Vonage/Skype backup at home since one of my routers does SIP too.)
• Gmail with sync'ed contacts and calendar using Mail for Exchange and Seven (which might actually be enough to handle push). Nokia Messaging but doesn't recognize Gmail labels as directories, while the Gmail app
  doesn't do push. I'm not able to push the new tasks in Gmail yet, but email/contacts/calendar is quite nice already.
• Opera Mini and Skyfire browsers. I love to multi-task between browsers, this is my mobile version of tabbed browsing.
• Sports Tracker.
• Nokia Maps (I rolled back to 2.0 from the 3.0 which didn't work for me - how to download maps) and Google Maps. You can use Nokia Map Loader to give you great offline support on your phone.
• Extra dictionaries.
• Newsgator Go which I'm not in love with, but I like Newsgator Online and obviously I want subscriptions and read/unread status kept in sync. It's got caching which should be useful to have stuff to do while offline.
• Devicescape Easy Wifi so that various applications don't have my home WLAN hard-coded in their settings.
• Nokia Location Tagger to geotag pictures on the fly.
• Though not technically an application, I like dabr for Twitter mobile access.
• Youtube Mobile Application is nice though limited, but I've never been a Youtube power user anyway.
• Jbak TaskMan

I'm planning a trip to the US in April/May (Denver and Miami) and want my phone to support me as much as possible during the trip. I usually rely on a good old piece of paper with all the necessary addresses and phone numbers and what not, but I hope it will act mostly as backup from now on.

Update: I've set up Teliax and made a couple test calls, seems pretty good so far. Vonage has seemed on the brink of extinction since pretty much they got started and Skype has never worked quite as well for me (some calls are great, some are crappy, it's always been more uneven in my experience). Plus, Vonage's soft phone is not cheap and I'm not sure there's even one for smartphones. More options means more resilience means less headaches and downtime.

Also: E71 tricks.

Update about push email: Seven sends SMS to the UK in a kind of sneaky way behind your back, and it doesn't work seamlessly with Devicescape Easy Wifi (at least for me). Not sure it's going to be my long term solution, especially given it won't work with messages stored on external memory. I tried Emoze but it doesn't seem to manage folders, at least not the free product. Next: Profimail.

I'm thinking of buying an unlocked Nokia E71 (about $400 at Newegg, the Blackberry Bold isn't really available unlocked yet at decent prices, and the iPhone has half a dozen dealbreakers for me). I want a device for use in various countries in South America, North America and Europe to have easy voice, email and web access while traveling without constantly needing my laptop. From what reviews report, the E71 can run Skype among other VOIP options, has a real keyboard, isn't a brick, is a decent email client, mp3 player and GPS, and an OK web browser and camera. I want to avoid at all costs the total rip-off that are overpriced contracts and international roaming, and I just want to own by own damn device without bending backwards to keep it unlocked.

So right now I'm trying to figure out what's available in the US, and let me tell you, Sprint, T-Online, Verizon and Sprint are competing to win the Most Useless Website award. So I'm begging you, dear reader, to email me with info on how to get 3/3.5G access in the US (most importantly, New England) without a damn yearly contract (ideally, without any sort of contract at all, as sometimes I just spend three days in, say, New York and don't go back to the US for six months so even a month-to-month PAYG contract is overkill).

Any help appreciated (email, twitter or IM, comments here are broken). Progress, if any, in my quest, will be updated here.

Update: bitching on my blog unlocked the right google query which led me to this, which looks like a winner. Update: or not as it looks like a loophole, but hey AT&T don't bother even listing PAYG data plans in your GoPhone pages, right? Medianet Unlimited is "unlimited" only if you use a phone without a full-fledged keyboard. Jokers/crooks. But then you have iPhone 3G users doing it. Seems worth a try buying one of the $10 GoPhone.

Update about the E71, it works in Europe and the US because it's quad band GSM, but 3G is an either/or proposition:

- Europe: E71-1 RM-346 = GSM 850/900/1800/1900; WCDMA 900/2100 HSDPA
- US: E71-2 RM-357 = GSM 850/900/1800/1900; WCDMA 850/1900 HSDPA

Well at least Chile is running HSDPA 1900 too, and I don't go back to Europe much these days. Can't have it all I guess, but what a headache.