First, the "gear": HP TC4200 tablet PC, Palm Pre(Sprint), Google Voice, Gmail, a hotel with wi-fi and ethernet in every room.
I started out optimistic, "I'll just surf craigslist for a while, call on some of the sweet looking houses, and I'll be done in a few days, piece of cake."
I quickly ran into a few snags, first, craigslist sucks for finding rentals. Specifically, single family detached homes. There is no good way to map them (even using the mashup sites), and craigslist doesn't have enough data, if "2 car garage" isn't in the title, the craigslist search box doesn't find it. Second problem with craigslist, many of the ads are missing stuff like addresses, and contact info! A few others go to email harvesting sites, and many people just never reply, or call back.
The next thing I tried was to only look at ads with addresses, and just go out to the property unannounced to snoop around. After I get a good look, I also canvas the neighborhood to see if I like it, and I can also dig up other rentals this way. If the house and neighborhood check out, I'll call the number on the sign or in the ad. But many were property management offices that were closed on the weekend, and I had just got really rolling on friday, so that hurt things a bit.
So, I'm gonna end up plugging realtors.com I can search for rentals and for sale properties, have searches with meaningful filters, and even dig into MLS numbers, and find out when a property was last sold and for how much.
So, once I clued in on this site, it was time to put rubber to the road and check these places out, I'd compose an email of addresses, send it to myself, and bring that up on the phone. Then I'd use copy-paste and flip between email and Sprint Navigation app on my palm pre. Multitasking!
Then I'd listen to it's directions, and hopefully arrive at the destination.
Some problems: Sprint Nav is a resource hog. the pre became very sluggish with just nav and email open, it would also set brightness to full, and chewed through the battery. I have a car adapter, but it's a cheap piece of shit, and must not always make a good connection, because I can seemingly drain the battery faster than I can recharge it while using Sprint Nav, email, and pandora. For those of you saying 'use google maps then', I'd like to remind them that it does NOT provide spoken instructions, nor will it advance the instructions to the next waypoint after hitting said waypoint.
Once I did reach a destination, I was able to fire up the camera app, and snap some photos for the places I like for reference later. The photos are geotagged, so I should be able to put these on the map in case I forget which photo goes with what address.
While there were no "GPS Drives me into a lake" incidents, it did send me down the wrong road a few times. Out here, there are some roads with "NW", or 'SW' designation on them and I think that confused it. In one instance, It kept sending me to Hickory Hills Trail, instead of Drive, and in another, it was convinced a road connected between two subdivisions, where it was really covered over with trees, and barely navigable by foot.
For the most part though, a GPS navigation app is a great thing, if I had to look up rentals in a paper, call people, and look on a paper map, I would have got about 1, maybe 2, houses a day.
I did bring the laptop with me one day, but ended up not using it. I figured I might want to hop onto realtors.com to snoop out more houses while out in the field, but it turns out that doing all that in advance while on the hotel ethernet is a better idea.
Realtors.com can just barely render on my Pre, it takes a while to come up, and while functional, is pretty darn slow. I certainly couldn't do any real hardcore searches on there yet.
Overall, data coverage here is great. I think I had one bar and slow poke data in one spot, and that was in a valley with trees all around.
I tried out google voice on this trip, and it would have been more fruitful had I set it up properly. I figured it would be more acceptable to people if I left a 404 area code number, instead of a 408 number. While my google voice number IS in 404, I didn't set up the forwarding right, so during 'working hours' GV went straight to voicemail, instead of ringing my phone! I didn't figure this out till friday afternoon, about the time where it no longer mattered. The moral of the story: Make sure to update any forwarding schedules while away from your normal routine.
GV does a half decent job with the transcriptions, which is great, because it will text me its best guess at a message, which lets me decide weather to fire up the GV webpage, give them a call back, or just sit on it until I'm back at the laptop. The mobile version of GV is shared betewen pre and iphone, and seems to work OK enough. For some reason, the gDialPro Pre app stopped working this week, (invalid password errors), though perhaps the GV API changed?
CDMA's limitation of data OR voice burned me once or twice. But at least I could be on a call and use the non-internet apps. (like jotting down info into a Memo), and other times I lucked out and had the laptop on the ethernet as the call came in. Still, this sucks, and I hope 4G networks are all VOIP.
The conclusion I came to for all this, is that it all felt like 'work', and while I got some 'work' done with the smartphone by itself, this particular task still requires that 'home base' mentality with the laptop as the main internet gateway, and the smartphone doing things very inefficiently.
I think this whole task of house hunting still hasn't become all it could be. For example, there is no way to have realtors.com send their map to my phone, nor was there any way to efficiently plot a course through all the selected houses. I had to look up everything separately, and sorta eyeball their placement in the email I'd send to myself, which was the guessed at order I should visit houses in. Also, the photos available for perusing are really poor. With the cornucopia of cheap digital cameras, I still don't understand why only 2-3 photos of a place exist.
If I had more time, It would have been cool to have a database ready to go, and I could have whipped out the tablet PC and entered notes and attached photos as I went along (and outward facing camera on the tablet would be cool), but something like that is a pretty involved piece of software.
in the end, I think I've got 2-3 houses that are good candidates, I just have to go through the application process, and write some checks on the winner.
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