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

I have now been an iPhone owner for two years. The phone is sold as operator locked here in Finland, but once the one or two year contract is up, the operator will unlock your phone if you ask. I called Sonera's customer support, explained what I wanted and the customer representative at the other end told me to wait 5 minutes and then sync the phone with iTunes using a non-Sonera SIM card. I did this and iTunes told med "Congratulations, your iPhone has been unlocked."

The choice of word - congratulations - is kind of ironic. But now I have an officially unlocked iPhone 3G.

The other day I run Speedtest.net in the tram in central Helsinki using both the iPhones own Sonera 3G connection and the free WiFi connection that Helsinki Regional Transport offers in it's trams. The trams uses Digita's @450 Flash-OFMD network to get a connection to the outside world.

I ran the test several times and with 3G I got over 400 kbps downstream while the speed using @450 never exceeded 30 kbps, sometimes staying as low as 12 kbps. The upstream speed was also much better using 3G.

For the record, I salute Helsinki Regional Transport for offering free WiFi in trams and I hope they will continue to do so - even a slow connection is far better than no connection.

The problem is really the @450 network that has failed on so many accounts and the latest news is that Digita will abandon the entire network as it is a commercial failure and the Flash-OFMD technology is dying.

Originaly the Finnish government offered the old second generation cell phone frequency 450 MHz to any operator willing to use this frequency to build a "wireless national broadband network". The idear was to have affordable 1 Mbps broadband in the entire country, even the most remote villages. Building the network took longer than expected, became more expensive, the network cards stayed expensive, the connection speeds remained lower than expected and the chosen technology lost out to the competing CDMA2000 EV-DO technology (which many of Digita's competitors wanted to use).

Not that EV-DO or WiMax networks are doing that well anywhere either. We keep expecting wireless technology to be able to compete with physical cables and that is unrealistic.

I finally got my iPad - now I only have to figure out what to do with it.

Yes, it's great for surfing the web, reading books and magazines and for viewing photos and movies but what else?

Then again, perhaps that is enough.

The Novatel Wireless MiFi is a small, battery powered device that creates a 3G data connection and a local WiFi field so that all your WiFi gadgets can get on the internet using that one 3G connection.

This is great if you are out and about where there is no WiFi and you have devices that can only connect to the net using WiFi. Now you have your own portable WiFi hotspot that will work everywhere there is 3G or even EDGE or GPRS coverage.

Technically speaking the WiFi is a great device. I got the European 2352 model that supports HSUPA/HSDPA at 900, 1900 and 2100 MHz as well as GPRS/EDGE at 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz. It supports up to 5 simultaneous WiFi devices. The rechargeable and replaceable battery lasts about 4 hours. You control the device using a web interface and you can configure things like WiFi encryption, port forwarding and most of the things you can configure on any WiFi base station. It also has a slot for a microSD card that turns it into a simple mini network attached storage (NAS) device so you can make files available among the connected WiFi devices.

That is all great and it works pretty much as advertised.

But it has some unfortunate drawbacks that hurts the overall impression. First of all, the plastic case makes if feel more like something you spent 25 euros bying, not 250. The battery cover is painfully difficult to remove and does not fit properly when closed. The device also gets VERY hot when used. And then there is that tiny problem regarding firmware upgrades. You can not get them. I'we Googled but all I could find was lots of other MiFi owners asking where to get the firmware upgrade. There is also, supposedly, a GPS inside this device but I am not sure and I certainly can not make any use of it. There is also an ARM processor inside the device and Novatel is trying to get people to build applications that can run inside the device but I'm not very hopefull. If I can not even get the updated firmware for the device, I'm not expecting much in terms of add-on applications.

The MiFi is a great little device that would be even greater if the plastic case was of higher quality and Novatel would support it with firmware updates.

I have been testing Club DVDnet for one month now - it's like Netflix but in Finland. You pay a fixed price per month and they send you two (plastic) DVDs per (snail) mail. Once you have watched the movies and returned them, they will send you two new ones. You need to keep a "wish list" with at least 15 movies in it and they will then pick two from that list whenever they send you movies. After one month I still have not gotten my top-options, only movies further down on the list.

Club DVDnet seems to have been around for several years already but I have never heard of them before and I found them only after quite some goggleing. I believe they have very few members. The hand written envelopes kind of implies this as well.

The real question of course is how quickly you will get the movies. Club DVDnet uses normal next day mail for their delivieries (and a return envelope with postage payed is included when you get the disks). They promise a three-day turn-around time where you, for example, watch your movies during the weekend and return them by dropping them in the mail by afternoon on Monday. Using next day delivery Club DVDnet gets the disks on Tuesday morning and they send you two new movies by Tuesday afternoon. The following day, on Wednsday morning, you get your next movies. During February 2010 I tried this service and always returned the disks the day after I got them - maximizing the number of movies I could get during one month for my fixed membership fee.

I joined on the first of February and got my first two movies on the third. After that I always got the movies acording to the three-day turn-around principle and I got my last two movies on the last weekday for February, Friday 26. All in all I got seven deliveries for a total of 14 movies. At 19,99€ that makes about 1,43€ per movie. At my local glass-and-steel video rental a five minute walk away I can get movies quicker and either cheaper or more expensively depending on if they are new or old. Unfortunately, my local video rental have very few old movies, no long-tail appreciation here. The local video rental have very little shelf space and this is why Club DVDnet is attractive - they have lots of interesting classics (if you can call 80's and 90's action movies classics). My local video rental has got the new Terminator Salvation movie, Club DVDnet has got the original one. If fact, they don't seem to be that big on the newest movies but they do have some BluRay movies as well.

All in all ClubDVD net works as advertised. Their web site is not impressive and filled with contradictions, they advertise a one-disk-at-a-time option for 17,99 but once you sign up the cheapest option is a 19,99 two-disks-at-a-time. The biggest drawback is perhaps the use of ordinary non-padded envelopes. They simply place both disks inside a normal DVD case intended for one disk and put it in an envelope. My first delivery contained two double disks for a total of four DVD's in one case and you can see the result. Several cases have been a bit broken on arrival but fortunately the disks have always been ok.

Club DVDnet is unimpressive compared to Netflix but it works and they are the only one on the market in Finland. I'll stick with them for another month or two.

The name is not catchy, the box is plastic and the user interface is terrible.

But the Asus O!Play does one thing my Apple TV has never been able to do; it can access video files in different formats on my network attached hard disks (NAS) and display them on my TV.

I bought the Apple TV when it was first introduced and I'we gone trough all the versions from 1 to 3 but my Apple TV still does not do that one thing I expect it to do. I have also tried to install the XBMC media player among other things but it still comes up short.

So I gave up and got myself an Asus O!Play. It costs far less than the Apple TV (about 100 euros in all), it does not have a nice cover, a built in power supply, local storage, WiFi or the fine tuned user interface that the Apple TV has. But it can see my hard disk over the (wired) network and it can open every media file I'we selected: AVI files with DIVX and MP3 compression, Matroska (MKV) files with XVID and OGG Vorbis compression and MP4 files with H.264 and AAC HE compression. The user interface looks like an example of poor usability from the 1990s, but it works.

I wish I could say the same about my Apple TV.

The Withings WiFi bathroom scale may seem like a strange gadget and a far fetched use for WiFi but it makes sense. Withings offers its users a nice web interface for tracking measurements over time using fancy graphs - it measures weight and fat mass based on electrodes in the glass surface. As long as all users of the same scale have somewhat distinct characteristics, the scale automatically identifies its user.

...and there is also an iPhone application for accessing your data, complete with push notification.

Some 20 years ago I discovered photography using a just barely automatic Minolta XG-M that did not even have auto-focus. I quickly learned to use the camera in "aperture priority" (Av) -mode where I chose the desired aperture size and the camera calculated a shutter speed to go with it - and since I wanted sharp images and shallow depth of field, I always kept the camera on maximum aperture.

That XG-M is long since gone, replaced by ever more advanced and more automatic cameras. Somewhere along the way, I don't remember exactly when or why, I abandoned aperture priority. Most recently I have been using a Canon Digital Ixus 860 IS (PowerShot SD870 IS if you have not gone metric yet) in fully automatic mode. Over the last two years I have developed a complete trust in the cameras ability to chose all settings for me and I have constantly been pleased with the results.

Then, yesterday, I switched to the new Canon PowerShot S90 and all that changed. I put it in auto -mode and went out to take some test images. I pointed at the item I wanted to have in focus and pressed the shutter half way down ... and the focus-box appeared in the lower left corner of the frame, focusing on a rock in the foreground. I tried again, this time the focus box appeared in the upper right corner, focusing on a building in the distance. I scrolled trough the settings again and again but found no way to switch of this "feature" while in auto -mode.

Canon's logic is sound. If you put your camera in auto -mode then you should not have to do anything other than to point the camera in the general direction. In most cases, the camera will do a better job picking objects to focus on than an average user who does not know how to focus.

Since I knew how to focus I obviously had to start using some other mode that auto. I eventually came to realize that what I want is really aperture priority - the same mode that I so loved twenty years ago. Granted, the S90 can not produce those shallow depth of field photos with soft backgrounds, but even so, aperture priority is what I want. All those fancy "aquarium" and "portrait" modes can not change the fact that I want maximum aperture size, shortest possible shutter time and lowest possible ISO rating.

It is comforting to realize that some basic concepts stay the same even though the tools we use develop at an amazing pace.

Or perhaps I'm just getting old and sentimental.

Nokia today introduced a completely new product: a netbook, the "Nokia Booklet 3G". How did the world react? Nokia's share price fell.

Why? How is it possible that this announcement could backfire?

Windows.

I believe there is disappointment that Nokia did not introduce this laptop with some revolutionary new mobile operating system, something that could compete with OSX / iPhone OS.

Nokia wanted to announce a new product but instead they announced that they have no alternative to Symbian, no secret weapon that can turn the company around.

Without an alternative to Symbian, Nokia's phones will continue to look unattractive compared to iPhones, Palm Pres and all the other new and modern smart phones out there.

New phone, new year and same old story.

Last year Sonera, the iPhone carrier here in Finland, got fewer iPhone 3G's than they had pre-orders and had to wait a month or two before supply caught up with demand.

This year Apple had learned from their mistake and did not try to launch the phone at the same day in every country, instead in some countries, such as Finland, the iPhone was launched a few weeks later than in the US.

That did not make much of a difference. Sonera still did not have enough phones as launch to satisfy even the pre-orders. I pre ordered a 32GB black iPhone 3G S but there where not enough of them and I was told I would get one "a few weeks" after the start of sales here in Finland - probably by the end of August.

By then the next model is about 10 months away so I decided to start waiting for that one instead. My 16 GB 3G is good enough.

In fact, since Apple has made every new iPhone OS version available for all previous iPhone models, the old ones are not getting outdated anywhere as quickly as, say, a Nokia phone. My iPhone 3G keeps getting new features - not all the features that the new phone gets - but still plenty. Apple's business strategy is quite original: "keep old products up-to-date" and "make old customers happy". As a previous Nokia customer I am not used to this.