S60 Open to new features

I made a day trip from Helsinki to Tampere yesterday.
Again, I preferred taking the train instead of driving my Skoda Fabia. But this was the first time I bought the train tickets from the internet and had them sent to my N95 over SMS. That's not so unusual; the service has been there for some time.

The funny thing was to see how the conductors behaved when checking the tickets.
I had the text message with the reservation details readily open on my phone.

On the way to Tampere, the conductor took my phone and without any hesitation entered the reservation code into his ticket machine and handed a receipt and my phone back to me. All done in 20 seconds!

On the way back to Helsinki, the same episode took five times longer. First, the conductor seemed to be afraid even taking my phone. Next, he needed to grab his reading glasses from the pocket - not that easy task when holding a phone and ticket machine. Then the display backlight went off (I have it on for 40 sec), and again he could not read the text. He did not know how to turn it on again, so he gave the phone back to me. Finally, slowly, he keyed in the reservation code into the ticket machine and I got the phone and a receipt – and a safe trip back home.

Some notes: SMS is a handy way to deliver tickets; the staff at Finnish State Railways has varying attitudes to new technologies; a quick way to zoom in and out text in the phone would be beneficial; the e-ticket layout could be easier to read; and taking a train is a comfortable way to travel. And I wonder how the reservation codes are actually generated and whether it sometimes could be possible to skip the phase of manually keying in complex numbers from a device to another.

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Comments

I always buy the tickets from the people in the train station, I can't use the machines since they're only in Finnish in Swedish.

Their ticket machines are HUGE, something tells me they need smaller PDA like devices with credit card scanners and the like. What I would really like is to just shot a bar code on my phone which his device can then scan.

They're trialing that in the states and UK: http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2201367/mobile-phone-boarding-passes-3570367

Posted by: Stefan Constantinescu | April 23, 2008 04:25 PM

No solution for me, though - I won't let anybody touch my smartphone, and I wouldn't hand it to complete strangers at all ... There has to be some other way to digitally buy and verify train tickets without me having to wipe my phone with a soft cloth afterwards :-)

Posted by: onlife | April 23, 2008 08:24 PM

I suppose in the future NFC could make this quicker. Currently QR-codes would be great. The conductor can simple snap a QR-code send by mms. QR-codes could be e-mailed printed and so on. No relinquishing your phone either.

Posted by: snoyt | April 24, 2008 01:58 PM

In my Hometown(Potsdam/Germany) we have since last spring a trail for NFC Technologies in Bus / TRAM and Ferry.
We can go with this "NFC-ticket" (i know it is know ticket ) to Berlin and we can use the German train network. But it is now only for test user but all our Stops for TRAM or Bus have still the "Touchpoint" to start the NFC ticket. (touchandtravel[dot]de)

Finland have all the time the newst Technologies e.g. UMA. This one fact why i will go after my a lever to Finland.

P.S. summer is back;-)
Nokius aka Julius-Paul Jann

Posted by: Nokius aka Julius-Paul Jann | April 24, 2008 03:55 PM

Probably one of the reasons Texas doesn't have better mass transit, the 4-5 times I took the train, no one ever came by to check if I even had a ticket.

However, this is something I would *love* to see put more into use at airports.

Posted by: Ricky Cadden | April 27, 2008 04:36 AM

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