Travelling Light by Vijay Verghese: iTravel with iPhone

Finally, this christmas Asian travellers can get their hands on the iNcredible iPhone. It can do just about everything except fire your boss - though she might drop dead with envy as you tap your fingers on that brilliant touch screen before her covetous eyes. Okay, so it doesn't have GPS, a global positioning system. Well, who cares if you're at the supermarket (like you told your wife), or at the lap-dancing club? If you're a sensitive sort whose father never hugged you, you're going to love this phone.

As with any complex and classy gadget, the first thing you'll do is to park it on the coffee table while you collect friends' drool in a large bucket. Use your old phone for work. At least that's what I did. I was overawed. I owned an iPhone. That was enough for me. I took a week before I slipped in my SIM card to discover a sobering downside - your addresses can only be synchronised with Microsoft Outlook on a PC or Address Book, and Entourage on a Mac. The SIM-card numbers are maddeningly inaccessible. The upside is you can now store over 1,000 contacts. That's a lot of massage parlours, believe me.

Business travellers as well as leisure browsers will relish the instant accessibility of WiFi on free networks, bypassing your service provider's usurious charges and restrictions. The quad-band Apple iPhone doubles as a sleek 11.6mm-slim, 115mm-long all-in-one MP3 player (that syncs with your iTunes) and a super 2.0 megapixel phone that delivers sharp images. It comes with 8GB of onboard memory. "Unlocked" versions - that can be used in any country - will cost a fair packet.

The sharp 480x320-pixel screen covers almost the entire length of the face, opening up lots of screen real estate to play with. And this is what makes the touch screen workable. All the icons are laid out. Tap one and get started. Send e-mail on the trot (there is integrated e-mail support for Gmail, Yahoo, Mac and AOL) or surf the Web. Pinch the screen to reduce images, or Web pages, and push the two fingers outwards to expand the view. Unfortunately the battery cannot be replaced, except by Apple. Bummer. A sleek phone like this also requires a soft gel plastic cover to prevent it from slipping out of your grasp. A pity, that. The iPhone is meant to be flaunted, yet every owner carries it swaddled in enough layers to make a Bedouin proud.

Are there alternatives to the iPhone? Sure. Leap under the wheels of a bus, dive off a cliff, stick your fingers into the national power grid. Or you might contemplate a stylish and compact HTC TyTN II. This is both a touch screen smart phone and a terrifying tongue-twister. Let's just call it "Bob". Bob is a truly smart phone in the sense he has features and gadgets for just about every occasion, including GPS so you know where the toilet is, a 3.0 megapixel camera (but no flash) so you always look good the morning after, and a nifty QWERTY keypad that slides out as the screen swivels upright. But Bob weighs a rather substantial 190g with battery. 

Not all BlackBerrys are born with two left feet and a hunchback. The RIM BlackBerry 8800 is a persuasive argument for the big-is-beautiful camp, with quad-band, GPS and messaging. There's no integrated WiFi but we can live with that. There are multimedia options galore and the de rigueur QWERTY keyboard is a lifesaver if you've been tapping unresponsive screens with your big thumb. A sleek design sets it apart from its siblings. It's still bigger and heavier (130 grams) but it's miles ahead in the looks department.

The quad-band Sony Ericsson K850i does what all Sony Ericssons do - it impresses hugely and doesn't disappoint. The camera packs in an arsenal of features including a whopping 5-megapixel Cyber-shot camera with flash, yet weighs in at a modest 118g. The phone is easy on the palms, with a grippable 100 x 48 x 18-millimetre form. Expect FM radio, video, Music DJ, a voice recorder, and HSDPA to rev up Web connections. Streaming video is possible and for those 3G office conference calls there's the front-facing camera to catch your every grimace. If you need news, there's even an RSS reader.

The Nokia N95 would be a standout for many reasons were it not let down by a somewhat plastic feel and a battery that barely lasts half a day, especially if you get carried away by the phone's many useful and novel functions. Which brings us back to the iPhone. It looks great on my coffee table. How about yours?

Vijay Verghese is an editor of Smart Travel Asia - an online travel magazine. Visit http://www.smarttravelasia.com