Life2go.net

Mobile technology should not be about cramming the office into your pocket but a way to enjoy your everyday life.

Everyone's connected, all the time and everywhere.

17-JUL-2005

Mobile blogging couldn't be easier. I just snap a photo with my cellphone, a Nokia 9500 communicator, create an e-mail, attach the photos, write the title and body message and select my blog from the address book - an address to flickr.com trough which the image and the text of my e-mail is pushed into my private blog here at Life2go.net. Then I press send and put my phone back into my pocket. Seconds later the blog-entry has appeared. My first entry once having arrived in China was done while I walked with my suitcase from the arrival hall to the buss.

The great thing was that I arrived in China from Scandinavia and I only had to switch on my phone and click send to get an e-mail with attachements to be posted. All the same settings I use in Finland works here: my GPRS setting for package data over the GSM cellphone network and all the e-mail (encrypted imap & smtp) settings work as they are. This is how it should be but all too often isn't.

And talking about encryption. Getting an SSH connection out of China from my hotel room does not seem to be possible - so I have to use a plain old insecure connection or pay way too much to keep an SSH connection open over GPRS to Finland.

It has been said that practically all internet cafes have been closed here in Shanghai because of ... what is that nice word for "censorship"..? Still, there are net cafes that are open and hotels have ethernet cables into rooms and offer great connection speeds like 2 Mbps in my case. I already heard rumours about text messages (sms) being unreliable because the government is supposedly monitoring all text messages sent by foreigners in Shanghai. I doubt it. What would be gained? Anyway, all my 50 or so text messages I have sent since arriving this morning seems to have gone trough immediately without problem.

And everyone has got a cellphone. I feel like Newsweek must have felt a few years ago when they came to Finland and found every teenager sitting and writing text messages ("The future is Finnish", Newsweek 1999). Now, in Shanghai, everyone - especially young girls - are sitting with their clamshell phones and writing text messages or taking photos. It seems there is a camera everywhere in China today, and most of them are operated by teenage girls. The future is looking pastel with a hint of Hello Kitty.