Smarter commuting, the cyborg way

Commuting in a big city has never been easy, but it's become particularly challenging of late. Whether it's London or New York, between security alerts, faulty equipment, inadequate infrastructure and sheer weight of numbers, the trip from home to work can feel more and more like an achievement in itself. Some question the wisdom of city life and ponder a less stressful move to the country. However, for me the solution is obvious: spend an incredible amount of money on digital technology to make the journey more entertaining.

The commute is stressful because it makes you feel powerless; because it's unreliable and you have no information when things go wrong; because you waste time you could be doing something useful at work; and because you waste time you could be doing something enjoyable at home. Armed with the latest high-tech weapons, these problems can be eliminated. It's important to take the 1980s idea of the 'Road Warrior' seriously. Only overwhelming digital force will get the job done. Commuting is a battle for space, for time, for shrinking resources. The solution is clear: get tooled up.

Stay in touch
As an ex-soldier I once worked for used to say whenever I failed to forward an internal phone call to him promptly: "Get your comms sorted. Now..." London Transport's excellent SMS update service sends me two messages every morning at 6 a.m. so that I know that the Northern Line is broken and I'll have to kayak into work again. The Web site is impressive, allowing you to specify two different routes into work, and it's free. In the evening, the service sends an email to me at work giving me the hard word about the journey home.

If it does all go pear-shaped and there's a total breakdown of the transport system, as it did last July, then there's nothing better than having a decent radio on you. We like PURE's PocketDAB 2000 portable digital unit, and of course many decent mobile phones now have radios, such as the excellent Sony Ericsson K750i.

The basic rule about remote communications is back-up and redundancy. I like the fact that the Palm Treo 650 smart phone lets me make a phone call, send an SMS message, or email via Versamail or our company's GoodLink software. The icing on the cake is remote instant messaging. You boot up VeriChat's Instant Messaging software and can connect you to Yahoo, ICQ, Microsoft Messenger and AOL IM systems. There's something very pleasing about doing IM from a bus stop, although I can't explain what.

The mobile bunker
If you're a knowledge worker then having access to your complete email inbox is priceless, particularly if you're having a bad commute. Both BlackBerry and Palm offer devices that allow you to deal with email remotely, which is a relief when you're stuck on the train and can batch-process more routine material, deleting stuff that isn't important. The keyboards of both the BlackBerry and the Palm are also excellent for typing brief three-line messages to colleagues, and the Treo 650 and 600 keyboards are designed to enable typing with one hand, so you can even process email when you're strap-hanging on a horribly crowded bus, train, or tube carriage.

A good portable RSS reader, such as Quick News for Palm OS is also invaluable: you can set it to update automatically before you leave the house, and then catch up on all the news and blogs you'd normally read at your desk. With Documents to Go  from DataViz, you can drag Word documents from your PC desktop to your Palm OS or Symbian OS handheld, and read that final draft of the report one more time before you hand it in. You can even catch up on your logistics with a copy of Ulstrasoft's Money, which will sync up with your desktop version of Microsoft Money.

R&R in the field
Even road warriors need to sit back, play the harmonica and grow misty-eyed with thoughts of home. Much of the stress of commuting comes from being forced to share reality with other combatants you don't know in hot, uncomfortable circumstances, but once you start choosing your own soundtrack and video programming, you can veg out happily in a world of your own. The latest iPod is, of course, standard issue, along with some folding Sennheiser NoiseGuard headphones, because they sound great and you don't want to inflict your musical choices on long-suffering fellow passengers. The latest iPod tech means you can also look at slideshows of your pictures, and even watch videos.

If you're a gamer, you can now bust out your PSP and experience game play that rivals your home PS2: favourites around here are Wipeout Pure and Ridge Racer, which are particularly good when the vehicles around you are moving at a crawl. On longer journeys you can also watch films, if you're in to teen sci-fi epics like Alien, Spiderman, and I, Robot. If you're commute's too short to swallow a whole space opera, and last night's TV is perhaps more to your taste, then check out the Archos AV700. This portable video player can plug into your TV system at home and record programming as though it were an ordinary VCR. The nice thing about this is you won't have to share the remote control or negotiate programming choices with anyone else but you: TV on the move is the ultimate You TV.

Getting tooled up like this has its challenges. The first is power. Inevitably, either your phone, your MP3 player, your PSP, or your video player will die on you just as you're settling down to enjoy it. One of the hassles of digital living is the enormous amount of power adaptors it requires. So it helps to have a little redundancy -- keep some video on your iPod and a basic MP3 ration on your portable video recorder. The second is borderline obsessional behaviour. The passion of the iPod owner for his nano, the gamer for her PSP, or the mobile warrior with his Treo can get out of hand. (Check out the excellent Treonauts Web site and you'll see exactly what I mean. You can love your handheld device too much.) Perhaps if all the money commuters spent on digital munitions to preserve their sanity was spent on improving public transport people would actually talk to each other, but I doubt it. In the meantime: lock and load that UMD, keep your Oystercard ready and make sure you've got enough juice to get you home.