First, an engineer in for an upcoming review for InfoWorld told me a secret of the BlackJack. I can’t say it’s been my very favorite phone up until now, but he showed me how to convince it to act as a wireless modem for my laptop. Joy! Now, I can get work done anywhere I can find a high-speed data signal (which is most of the places I tend to travel). Since I have the unlimited data plan, I figure AT&T can get only so ticked off at me. After all, bits are bits.

Next came a critical revelation about an important application one of my publications uses to manage articles. Since joining the pub, I’d been told that a VPN connection was required to reach the app and, for various reasons, I had to use the pub-supplied laptop for the VPN connection. On a phone call earlier this week, a fellow editor let it slip that no VPN connection was actually required. I checked, and he’s right! Joy, again! I’ve had to do just a bit of application hacking, since the publication is still using Office 2003 and I’m using Office 2007, but I’ve managed to get everything working and I can feel my stress level dropping dramatically. To be able to get necessary work done wherever I am is a gloriously liberating feeling.

That’s it–I’m now more mobile, with my cell phone and single laptop giving me an office-in-a-messenger bag. I’m altogether too pleased with the situation, but it’s put a nice glow on the week.

To avoid the pain, I’m thinking about using a little Dell XPS machine I’ve had sitting around for a couple of years. It’s not the hottest new processor, it has a tiny hard disk (less than 20 gigs), and not much memory (384k), but it’s really small, really light, and has built-in networking. I’m thinking that a stripped-down OS with just enough applications might make this the perfect note-taking platform, since it would also let me check e-mail, do a bit of research, and check my schedule between classes. My real question is whether to keep it on Windows XP or try a Linux variant–Ubuntu, perhaps? I’d be interested in your thoughts on this one…and I’ll keep you posted on the decisions.

What made me really think seriously about this? The introduction of the Foleo from Palm. I’ve heard a number of folks talking about what a useless concept it is, but I disagree. Sometimes, you just need something to do basic work on until you can get back to the Mother Ship. The Foleo isn’t trying to be your only computer–it’s trying to be the device you carry with you when your real computer is just a little too much. I don’t know whether the Foleo will be a wildly successful device, but I think the category will be, though it may take a little while to fully develop. Jeff Hawkins has a good track record on this sort of thing–I wouldn’t bet against him here.

I have a Samsung Blackjack phone from Cingular. On the whole, it’s a fine cell phone, though I’ll admit that I often miss the Treo I was using in my last job. Anyway, I went out to the Cingular support site and was told that I didn’t need to do anything to the Blackjack–it was ready for the shift to Daylight Saving Time. With my other systems patched, I felt pretty good. Silly me.

When I got up yesterday morning I had to quckly head out to the airport, so I didn’t look at the phone for a couple of hours. When I did, I noticed that the Blackjack was still on standard time. I turned it off on the plane, and when I turned it back on at the mid-point of the trip I expected the time to have reset. Nope. Turning the phone off and traveling to California didn’t help, either. Rats.

I finally did some searches and found that Microsoft had released a Special Daylight Saving Patch for the Blackjack. I downloaded the patch, applied it to the phone, and the world was once again in temporal balance.

So what’s the lesson here? I suppose it’s that you shouldn’t trust a single participant in a multi-vendor system to tell you all you need to know. In my case, there are three vendors who have portions of my phone; Cingular, Samsung, and Microsoft are each participants. My mistake was assuming that Cingular would have a handle on the operating system issues. It would be nice if the company that directly took your money for a product could be counted on to properly support it, but that may be asking too much in today’s world. Congratulations, pilgrim–you’re on your own. The times, they are a-changing, and it’s up to you to make sure all your systems keep up.

Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld has one of the more cogent critiques of Apple’s timing and Jobs’ speech. It will be interesting to see whether the great Apple marketing machine can make a winner of this phone.