Switching from Sonera to Elisa

I've been preparing my personal operator subscription switch from Sonera to Elisa, including whole family.

There is good reason for that and it's fixed data plan which Elisa has and Sonera has not.

It makes lot of sense to have fixed priced 3G/GPRS access and 9,9€/month is not much for that. Compare that to Sonera's 1€ / "for every starting hour" which is insane, I think kind of Swedish approach.

Nokia N810

I've been waiting this thing to be available. Since I have very good experiences from previous model (N800), I am almost ready to invest my personal money for this N810.

Yesterday morning I was reading verkkokauppa.com leaflet which came in side of daily newspaper and it was nice to notice that N810 was announced in there for 449 € (and of course E90 was gone).

So, are we seeing some strategy shift in Nokia from S60 to Maemo in future, because of android and because of 'success' of S60...?

E90, still not right

I should have known this, my E90 which just got back from service is having still problems.

I just noticed that small screen brightness is all time full and setting for brightness is not affecting at all. Great. Oh why Nokia why, can you please explain to me what is difference between E90 and other great phones you are producing (like E61i) ?

Now I have my E90 with full brightness, it's not the show stopper but annoying feature.

E90 is back

Yesterday I got call, my E90 has returned from service. Front keyboard problem has resulted "system unit change" into service report and yes, top of E90 was changed and inner display had nice protective cover also.

So, once again - I synced my contacts and calendar from E61i back to E90 and I was right on track. I have lost everything else along a way, but this contact and calendar sync works between phones. Email and other settings I always enter manually.

E90 still in service, E61i got upgraded

While E90 is still (and again) in service, I was greeted with new firmware availability for E61i (2.0633.65.01). Update went smoothly and now I am enjoying this solid workhorse with notably faster firmware.

It's been *very* interesting to watch Nokia with this E90 saga. They are not publishing any advertisements for E90 (here in Finland) and whole product seem to be faded away.

It's a shame, since last upgrade for E90 firmware was really making difference for GPS functionality and I felt really comfortable with it. But apparently there are some issues with this new firmware , since after that upgrade E90's external keyboard got this strange pressings syndrome (eg. from pressing 5, display showed *74). From my point of view, it must be software glitch.

Soul saved

Visited my colleague today and noticed his battle with ancient windows XP and spyware. His computer was long gone with XP.

What we did, we saved GPG keys from disk and installed ubuntu 7.10. It was fast and furious again, restored keys and installed flashplayer. He was happy within 30 minutes, new ubuntu user with some desktop candy and fully working GPG environment for encrypted email.

So, I have personally saved one soul today, decreased somebody's botnet computer by one and made microsoft to look very funny again.

HP Customer support and Vista

Referring to previous posts, you probably remember that I've been starting to do some business together with couple of colleagues. We have put up a firm, targeted to develop something very interesting.

For that oblivious reason, I became a company customer to HP when I acquired a laptop from them. I also issued question to HP, am I able to use that Vista license under Linux hosted vmware, as a guest operating system. Answer was simple (from HP customer care); "of course you can". But I knew there was a catch in there.

When I indicated that I certainly would like to do that, because I own Vista license (even my primary working environment is based on all Linux approach - it would be nice to have that spyware magnet around). So, next question killed the fun from customer care. Since I knew that I cannot use those recovery DVD's to restore Vista to vmware, I asked how should I proceed?

HP customer care answered me; you can use it legally, but "you just have to get that (installable) media somewhere.." I asked from them that it's little strange that when I own rights to have something, I am allowed to use it in that way - I still have no meaningful ways to do it.

So, now I am after some copy of Vista installation media...

Windows - painful experience

It arrived yesterday. My coding laptop HP 6710b. It was a bit bigger what I thought, but after all it's very basic 15.1" laptop for business. Display is nice 1680*1050 resolution and over all appearance is solid.

But as usual, Microsoft part of it was pain. I booted it and Vista started it's preparations and after that HP own software started it's installation. Over two hours of that, I decided to do recovery DVD's and an another hour went by. I got my computer at 10 am and after 2 pm I was ready to wipe that Vista.

I had over 10 minute experiences of Vista in there and when ever I chose a program from menu - it kept asking 'are you sure that you trust to this and this can be run?'. I cannot see any future for such a system.

But Ubuntu was breeze, with in 15 minutes it was installed and everything worked right out of the box.

I have a nice story about HP customer support and Vista installation under vmware, but I'll make an another post of it later.

Coding laptop for personal use

Today I ordered HP 6710b laptop (GB892ET) for my own firm. Primary purpose for such a computer would be of course coding and developing. I issued couple of points to HP as a question - I know I will not get any decent answers to those, but here they go:

I buy that laptop with Windows VISTA (business) version. I have therefore license for this operating system. I will reformat computer and install Linux as primary operating system. As a owner of Vista, am I able to do following:

1. I install VMWare server for Linux host operating system. Can I restore Vista to one of the virtual machines ?

I think this Windows conspiracy sucks, it prevents our business to expand at it's full and limits too much of an innovations. I am happy that there are Linux for professional use - I really hope that computer manufacturers starts to support it.