Life2go.net Get a life ...to go.

I have now reached the final milestone on my path to become a real Mac fanboy - I bought a Mac, the new Core 2 Duo model to be more specific.

Long-distance buses belonging to the ExpressBus alliance here in Finland will be retrofitted with WiFi, giving passengers high speed internet access. Eventually. The connection with the outside world will be handled by a @450 connection - the near mythical FlashOFDM based "wireless broadband" technology that is supposed to bring bring high speed (as in 1 Mbps) to the entire country.

But that is all in the future. This is still only the year 2007 and as the driver told us over the loudspeaker as we departed Helsinki: "for your convenience, there is a toilet in the back of the bus, have a nice trip".

There is only one day a year that you will have no problem finding parking space in down town Helsinki and that is during midsummer's eve. Everyone who can, travels to a rural setting, preferably by the water, to consume alcohol. seeing free parking space like this is indeed an unusual sight and I immediatelly felt a need to photograph it - and with the camera in the mobile phone I could.
Pocket cameras, despite their name, are usually not carried in your pocket. I have mine in a computer backpack that I often carry with me but not always. Now I have a camera that is almost as good for snapshots and it is ALLWAYS with me in my belt. I had cameras in my previouse phones aswell, but I did not use them as frequently as I knew they would not be able to take good enough photos in some situations or lack the necessary detail and sharpness to make the photo worthwhile. With the camera in the Nokia E90 I am now more likely to take pictures than before.

Great hardware, not so great operating system. That pretty much sums it up. Or, to make a pun out of it: "mocha is the new beige".

I have spent the weekend testing the new Nokia E90, at least 20 hours actively using it: everything from downloading podcasts over WiFi to syncing with outlook, uploading images to flickr, failing to get the GPS to work and factory resetting it a few times.

I kept a tradition alive, photographing the new phone in its box, using the previous phone. For some reason, these photos tend to look like they have been taken hastily.

The Nokia E90 is a nice looking phone, looking much like any normal S60 phone. It sits well in your hand and feels very sturdy indeed, almost metal-like. The external screen is a large 240x320 vertical screen and it works just like the screen in any other S60v3 smartphone. For the first time in any communicator, the external and internal screen are two different displays for the same device - any open application will resize itself on-the-fly and continue to run on the other screen when the phone is opened and closed. Previously, communicators have had two very separate parts, the phone part with a simple user interface on the external screen and a PDA part with a more sophisticated user interface and very few resources have been accessible from both parts - usually only text messages and contacts.

This Apple AirPort Extreme WiFi .11n base station is my first Apple product and I am now officially an Apple fan-boy.

The packaging is impressive. I was smiling before I even opened the package. And once I opened the package, I smiled even more. They must have a whole department planning how to package things - it's just impressing.

White plastic has never been this beautiful. Shiny, minimalistic, symmetric. Nice. Even the power supply is beautiful, and has long, soft power cords. Impressive.

Setting it up really was simple, just as advertised. Impressive. Even the Samsung laser printer started working trough the USB port on the back of the AirPort as a network printer over WiFi without any problem. Impressive.

Reliable? You bet! The old D-Link was resetting itself every few minutes whenever there where there where two laptops connected but the AirPort works like a charm. After my experience with D-Link, this is impressive.

Sure, it was the most expensive WiFi base station in the shop and set me back 180 euros, but it's really ... impressive. This was my first Apple product, but it is certainly not going to be my last.

Bluetooth enabled (and discoverable) phones in the room during a small meeting for bloggers - blogimiitti - in Helsinki, Finland. "Älypuhelin" means "smartphone" and "matkapuhelin" means (normal) mobile phone.

This is how bluetooth viruses spread.

While waiting for the tram at the local tram stop I noticed a paper with a 2d barcode, more specifically an "UpCode". The local public transport company (HKL/HST) running the trams now has an exciting new service for your convenience based on the latest innovations from Finnish mobile pioneers such as the revolutionary and interactive UpCode, making use of camera phones, built in browsers and 3G to really make you part of the information society.

You can install a special Java or Symbian application (well, a few people can), get down on your knees to be close enough to the symbol, launch the upcode application, hope it starts without problems and is able communicate with the camera, snap a photo of the upcode, hope it is clear enough and - like magic - it will take you to a web page without you having to manually punch in the tram stop number "0105".

However, just in case one of the steps mentioned above fails, or you don't want to stand on your knees hoping for a clear picture, they have that number printed in plain text as well so you can punch in the four digits manually.

I wonder what the companies that did NOT get venture capital funding where trying to peddle.

Would you like to have Google Earth in your phone? I would, especially after seeing Steve Jobs keynote speech where he demonstrated Google Earth/Maps on the iPhone. And as it turns out, you can get Microsoft's competing service Virtual Earth / Microsoft Maps for you phone - at least if you have a phone with Windows Mobile.

At ideas.live.com (Microsoft's alternative to Google Labs) you can download Windows Live Search for Mobile (beta) and it will give you a similar service as Google Earth with satellite photos and maps (or a "hybrid" mode) of the entire world. At least for Finland, it includes a complete street map of every city, zoomable to the finest detail where you can see even the smallest alleys and all street names - and the service makes excellent use of my phones 640x480 pixel display. This is not a browser based service, but a Windows Mobile application that you install.

I have used Microsoft Pocket Streets for years, but this is much better and with 3G/UMTS speed, it is quite usable.

When Hussein was executed, there was an official camera crew present to document the event for legal and historical purposes. There was also a guy with a camera phone.

When something unexpected happens, no matter where or what, there is usually someone with a camera phone nearby. But then there are those incidents when both amateurs and professional journalists are present and both are taking photos or videos - but only one of them chooses to publish it.

Media professionals follow a code of ethics as well as local laws and regulations when it comes to choosing what to show or use and what to leave out. Anonymous amateurs do not. The official video from Hussein's execution has not been released, at least not yet. The amateur video from the execution, on the other hand, is already available on Google video and many other such sites and some mainstream media sites have started to link to it and even show it in their TV broadcasts.

We can not get amateurs to follow the rules of mainstream media and mainstream media can not hold on to its old rules and risk being overrun by amateurs. Up until the second world war, it was unthinkable to show a dead body in a newspaper article - but this changed when the journalists decided that people should know what happened in the German concentration camps. The rules kept changing and now with camera phones and video sites, any death is important enough to be shown - as long as an amateur is there to film it. Three weeks ago, a war veteran here in Finland committed suicide at a military parade by suddenly going out on the street and lying down in front of a tank. There where plenty of journalists around, but the only published material of the actual incident came from a spectator's camera phone that was uploaded to youtube.

It is with little joy that I realize just what a killer application the camera phone really is, but there is no point moralizing about it - can we really expect something else when everyone has the tools and the means to publish? And with page-view counters, it is difficult to take the moral high ground and clame this is something we do not want.