On Saturday last week I picked up my i-mate JasJar from the office in Docklands, Melbourne. Those of you who are familiar with Readify known that we don’t often admit to having an office, its really just where things get delivered and routed – and of course where the boss man spends a fair portion of his time.

Over the weekend I spent some time getting acquaninted with the device and on Tuesday I was able to keep in touch with e-mails as my wife, daughter and I drove back from Melbourne to Canberra.

This morning I was running late for a meeting and I needed to send off a status report so that those attending were up to date with current goings on. I had just finished off the report and wanted to send it – unfortunately I was the wrong side of a hill somewhere between where I live and Woden (which is the first place my iBurst signal picks up).

I then remembered that the JasJar can be used as a bluetooth modem so I partnered it with my laptop and stuck the phone in my top pocket and dialed up a connection to the Internet. One of the nice things about living in Canberra is that phone coverage is generally pretty good so I was pretty much assured of getting a GPRS connection – what surprised me was that I got a UTMS (3G) connection.

So here I am – somewhere which was historically a blackspot for my (mostly) ubiquitous Internet access sending and receiving at about 144kbps – not bad, even iBurst couldn’t do that sitting still at the bus depot.