Re: [tlug] Best communications-enabled, efficient visit

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2016-06-15 21:44 -1000 (Wed), David J Iannucci wrote:

> * Suica vs Pasmo. Which one should I get?

They're effectively the same thing, for your purposes. (This may not be
true if you decide to buy a commuter pass, but I'm guessing you wont be
doing that.) Just take whatever's at the first machine you come to.

>   Is there any concern about having money stolen off the cards by
>   people standing close to you?

No. The applications on the cards authenticate the servers to which
they're talking.

> * Recommendations on renting a smartphone. I guess an iPhone, because
> I've heard iOS is better than Android.

Which is "better" is actually a moderately complex question.

As far as the UI goes, Apple stuff is just as dumb and unintuitive as
Windows or Linux or Android stuff, unless you've already learned the
Apple environment, in which case it's much the same thing or far, far
superior (depending on how much you've become an Apple fashion victim).

Certainly, if you're going to grab a random phone, especially a cheap
one, with Android you run the risk that the phone won't work very well.
(For example, even my $800 Sharp SH-05G tablet is a dog, despite having
8 cores and 2 GB of RAM, because DoCoMo made a mess of the software on
it; it's considerably slower than my much older $200 Google Nexus 7,
despite the latter having only 4 slower cores and 1 GB of RAM.)

I find that the primary advantage of Android, besides being a little bit
cheaper for what you get, is that it's effectively a sort of terminal
in to the Google cloud, as opposed to a stand-alone device. I don't
worry much about losing or breaking a phone or tablet because on any
Android device I can simply do a factory reset, log in, and, aside from
having to re-install apps, I'm up and running with my mail[*], chat,
calendaring, files and books (though actually a lot of those I sync from
my Dropbox account) and so on. My work happens to use Google accounts as
well, so all that stuff appears with another sign-in. And I switch back
and forth working between two tablets, a Chromebook and three or four
other computers on a continual basis.

[*]: Well, my mobile mail, anyway. For various reasons I still run my
own mail server, usually forwarding copies of messages to my "mobile"
addresses to Google.

Depending on who you're talking to, you could also consider Internet
voice chat (I use Google Hangouts extensively with excellent results)
or, if you need to interoperate with "real" phones, an IP phone service
such as Skype of NTT's 050 Plus[050].

[050]: http://506506.ntt.com/english/ipphone/plus/

Personally, if I didn't need "real" phone service, I'd probably buy a
$200 used phone or tablet with mobile data (make sure it's "SIM-free")
and just use that worldwide.

> * I found this: http://flets.com/freewifi/. Looks good, and there are a
>   bazillion places to access it, apparently. I also know about JR East's
>   free wifi service. Any personal experiences with either of these that
>   it would help me to know?

The train station WiFi (both JR and the subways) has been great for me.
Starbucks, too. (Remember, you need to pre-register for it here.) I've
never used Flets' service. I have used DoCoMo's WiFi add-on service (I
have a DoCoMo phone plan) and it was horrible; I could never seem to
find an access point where I needed one.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch