Hey, so the life of an international traveler is oh so exotic, romantic and glamorous, right? Until, that is, you get that mobile phone bill.

¡Ay, caramba!

Recently I've been having all sorts of fun with push email flying into and out of my handset on a more or less constant basis.

The new software update to my N95 that added Flash Lite 3.0 (sweet!) has opened up the whole of YouTube to my ever so inquisitive viewing, and my Slingbox has been keeping it real by sending episodes of "must see TV" that I must see - direct to my mobile with Slingplayer Mobile for S60.

Add that to Yahoo! Go, posting pictures to my VOX site, wayyy too much Facebook shenanigans, a passion for podcasts, a possible addiction to Wikipedia, the worlds greatest mobile browser and, well, you get the picture.

This is all well and good and has never raised the question of an impending intervention or a 12-step data dependency cure as long as I was in my home market where the all-you-can-eat data plan was in its full glory.

until...

As you might expect, I went on a business trip to a trade show where my responsibility was to demo much of the aforementioned capabilities. Problem was, the trade show was in Barcelona..... And I sometimes used my own SIM card to show off all this stuff..... For 10 hours a day..... For four days in a row.....

I used a bit of data.

OK, maybe a lot of data.

Oh, and did I mention my all-you-can-eat data plan was no longer all-you-can-eat when I crossed the border?

The good news (for me) is that I don't pay my own mobile bill.
The bad news (for me) was that my boss called.

Ouch.

Again it is time to celebrate the spring and have Wappu. On 1st of May we, Finns, gather into the streets and parks to have some champagne and have fun together with friends and family. You might have heard about our party style; it is what it is so it includes lot of booze… But we also want to share the moments and views with others who are not with us (or if they are it is not a problem either :-)) and we send tens of text messages and multimedia messages during the day. Usually this is done by sending the same message to all of the friends at the same time. We take fuzzy party pictures and send bad jokes or then just wish the best day for someone special. And some of us receives as many messages…There is only one problem when doing all this. When you choose the names from your contacts list you need to remember and concentrate who was the last added person so that you don’t add him/her twice into the group message. The contacts list could have indication telling what name is already inserted or the list could be filtered to include only names that are not yet added. Very challenging situation if you have tasted some champagne….Anyway, have fun and take care!

PS. added this pic of our wappu champagne & strawberry cake at work.

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.

Hi there,

Charles here, from the S60 marketing team, based out of Irving, Texas (in the heart of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex). Been here 10 years - love the summers - don't have the hat.

Have you all (y'all) seen this yet? (wait til I bust an "all y'all" out - it's the present imperfect plural of y'all) ;-)

In a survey conducted by Jupiter Research, it says that two-thirds of US adults don't care about listening to music on their mobiles. The overview says that evidently the cost per download and the difficulties in getting the music onto the device were to blame for this sorry state of affairs. Also causally mentioned was the proliferation of existing mp3 players.

One (surprising?) stat that was in the report was that only 5% of U.S. mobile subscribers sideload tunes from their computer.

Wow.
again, for effect,

...WOW!

Maybe I'm the oddball here, but I am an inveterate sideloader. Always have been, probably always will be. Not sure I trust people who don't (kidding - they're ok, for non-sideloaders anyway)

So the point is, what is it about the whole experience that's to blame? Is it because they are "adults"? Is it that they've never used S60 for music?

What's the good, the bad and the ugly about the S60 experience for music? How do you think it is different from WM or UIQ, Apple, etc.? Is the experience different in your eyes...and ears...and wallets?

Talk amongst yourselves...

Hi all folks! I'm Minna and I'm working in S60 marketing team in the area of user experience. Here, in this blog I will share my views and experiences about business and freetime mobile phone usage.

That in mind: Have you ever thought of what keeps you happy as user after you have used your mobile or any device for a while? I just faced this recently when I was planning to change my mobile into newer. I have N95 and I was thinking if I could have new one because it does not look so shiny anymore but is more like washed out in rough conditions (like at my summer cottage renovation project). But, then again…so what. It has been a good tool for me, also in business and it has all the things I need. I'm familiar with it so why to change working relationship even thought the glamorous times are over and I'm not anymore surprised of cool details….. What's your opinion? Should the device be designed so that it keeps changing somehow or is the idea more like "the less it takes focus from other things, the better it is"?