Hands-On Report--The iPhone at Sea, How well does it work on a cruise?

Our Editor-in-Chief is taking some well-earned time off and enjoying a short 5-day cruise to Cabo San Lucas (Cabo) with his family. For those who do not know the west coast of Mexico, Cabo is situated at the very tip of Baja California about 700 miles south of San Diego. Once a sleepy village supporting a tuna cannery and a Bing Crosby hotel with outstanding marlin fishing, fantastic skin diving and hammerhead shark reproduction, Cabo is now a super hot spot for tourists with wild nightlife, time-share condos, golf courses and resorts. But this story is about the iPhone and how well it worked aboard the Carnival ship Elation and in Cabo.

The Elation advertises that it has wireless network for accessing the internet throughout most of the ship and an internet cafe amidships. Unfortunately, we have a forward cabin that is just out of reach of the wireless network but the Elation also has several salons within reach, like the Mark Twain Library, that for some reason remain mostly vacant and are a great place to read or write without the usual constant noisy hustle and bustle of a cruise.

Also unfortunately, internet access is quite expensive--the best deal being $24/per hour. This is fine for those who just want to keep in touch with loved ones by email but quite expensive for real work. Well, after all, everyone is supposed to be on vacation and not doing any real work, right? Mrs. Editor-in-Chief fiercely believes this but the better half is getting some pre-paid spa treatment, an admitted diversion, while this report was written and posted.

Aboard the Elation docked in San Diego, AT&T's signal was available all over the ship. San Diego seems to have a really good EDGE network because we have no problem with email and Web surfing using EDGE just about anywhere we've tried it around the county, including on the Elation. Of course, WiFi is much faster but EDGE is completely usable as we have written in other reports on our iPhone experience.

Once the Elation got outside San Diego's harbor a fair distance, the ship's cell phone network called "cellular AT SEA" took over. We placed a few calls to test the service and it worked just fine with AT&T's International Roaming enabled. We are just not sure what the charges will be nor where they will turn up but probably not on our "Sail & Sign" bill when we check out at the end of the cruise.

As we cruised down the coast of Baja we occasionally got a signal from "Mx Telco" but mostly it stayed with "cellular AT SEA." We never tried to phone with "Mx Telco" while at sea.

We signed up for the Elation's internet service to file Monday's article and discovered that we had no problem logging into our WiFi account with our iPhone as well. Opening the iPhone's Safari brought up the login page and with the iPhone in landscape position, we easily typed in our username and password. Now, we could check email anytime we wanted to on our iPhone and out of habit we did.

We discovered one unfortunate problem. We can receive email by WiFi but we are unable to send email via WiFi from our iPhone aboard the Elation. When we originally sync'd our email accounts with our computer back home at the end of June, it automatically configured our iPhone with the outgoing smtp server of our office ISP provider, Cox Communications. We have encountered this problem frequently in hotels when we travel with our MacBook Pro (and PowerBooks before it) and instead we simply use the relaying service of our Web host. But, we can not figure out how to reconfigure the the outgoing smtp server settings on our iPhone. Perhaps, it has to be done via iTunes on our computer back home but we'll keep looking.

The outgoing smtp server issue seems to affect only WiFi because we have not had this problem using EDGE.

When we anchored in Cabo's bay, we got a strong "Mx Telco" signal. Once ashore, we also got AT&T's EDGE network along with the "Mx Telco" connection. We successfully made a call via "Mx Telco" and picked up email and Web pages via EDGE. Apparently, there's EDGE and then there is EDGE. The EDGE service in Cabo was much slower than in San Diego but it worked. At a free internet hot spot in Cabo, the iPhone worked well except for the outgoing smtp server problem.

In summary, the iPhone is working well at sea, both with the ship's cellular service and the ship's WiFi, excepting the outgoing smtp server issue. It also worked well ashore in Cabo. We read a note from someone who successfully used their iPhone in Cancun so those traveling to Mexico may find adequate if not cheap service. [Bill Fox]