Hi, I am a complete technoidiot and I just want a few laughable questions answered....

I am off to Indonesia to do some volunteering soon hurrah. I am planning to break things up with some stays in hotels/places that I know have wifi access. I would like to be able to talk to/email my family whilst I have this access.

A laptop is too cumbersome but a Nokia tablet looks perfect for my needs...

OK, here are my questions...

1) Will a tablet work with all wifi access, is all wifi by nature broadband?

2) Bluetooth. If I use my mobile phone bluetooth to 'make the tablet get the internet' (!) will my mobile phone provider charge me an arm and a leg for doing this or is it just a channel and I won't get charged? Will my phone be able to 'find' the internet whichever country I am in.

I cannot find the answers to these questions anywhere on the web- I am obviously supposed to just know these things.

Does it look like the N800 would be a good buy for me or do you think it wouldn't work...??

Please resist the temptation for sneering responses- I already know I'm useless!!

Any advice more than gratefully received

Cheers

12barney34

1) for the most part, yes-- with caveats such as mode (b, g, etc), security, and others.

2) You could be charged outrageously depending on carrier and plan. My data plan in the US is "all you can eat" for $35 per month. But when I was in France, the co-carrier charged $500 USD for an hour's use.

Oh, and the N800 should work fine for you. I used mine as a laptop substitute once in Helsinki and did about 95% of what I can normally do.

Thanks for getting back to me!

My phone people are complete b******s so I fear that I shall have to give bluetooth connection a miss. Something to bear in mind next time I renew my contract however......

Cheers for the advice- mucho appreciato

To add:

1. WiFi is only a means of extending coverage and enabling wireless connection of many to one. However, I have seen some places that hook up a Wifi router to a 256k broadband connection. That's all fine if you're the only guy on the network, but toss in 50 folks browsing the web, or 3 guys hitting torrents, and you can forget about getting any decent quality on internet voice chat (voip)

2. roaming charges are usually very expensive. My experience with mobile data has been 50/50 at best. I'm hooked up to a HSDPA network with my E51 that's supposed to be good for up to 3.6 Mbps (in theory). Again, this does not take into account contention and network congestion, in which case, it's going to be a little hard to get a voip call going.

Packet loss, jitter and other network factors will also play a very important role in the quality of your voip call. Until we have IPv6 which should offer Quality of Service (QoS), these are the constraints of VoIP, N800 or not.

In countries which have more developed infrastructure and WiFi ubiquity, you should be able to use the tablet for what you described. In Indonesia, I have some doubts about the quality of the network, but you'll never know.

Hope this helps

You lost me in the 3rd paragraph...

I hope to mainly be using the tablet in Java, a bit of research confirmed that this is actually the most uptodate of the islands when it comes to telecomms etc. so hopefully I will be OK. Fingers crossed there aren't 100 people trying to access in the same place at the same time as me

I know I've no hope on Karimun Jawa which is the little island where I'll be spending most of my time! Would just be nice to have something when I am in 'civilisation'.

I'm not even going to risk any form of 'phone/bluetooth roaming. £350 bill when I got back from India last year- most of that from people calling me!!!

Thanks for the advice. I'm defo going to go for it....

Ebay USA here I come....

ALmost any place with WI-fi access should give you broadback internet speeds - wifi is usually very fast.

you might want Claws-mail if you ever get a tablet - to check your mail - maybe much better that the email pre-installed.

If you were there long term you could get a mobile phone and maybe it would give you good access using your tablet. You can search for tethering to find the forum thread about this.
In general every phone is different (just having bluetooth - it still might not work). Also, many plans are different if they allow tethering and don't charge much. There are a few threads where people shre what phones/cell companies worked.
SOunds like a fun trip.