Motorola XT720 photo quality vs Samsung i8910

I use both phones in parallel during the trip to Crimea, Ukraine, and even took some comparative shots.

Only XT720 photos

Notice in the left side of the photos below, this is my finger. Happens to often with XT720, due to placement of the camera on the very edge of the phone, too close to the point, where you naturally keep your fingers.

Using flash in the poorly lit museum, during daytime. No nighttime pics yet.

Motorola XT720 on the left, Samsung Omnia i8910 on the right

My overall verdict stays the same, photo quality of XT720 is quite average, hopefully this will change in the next firmwares.

Nice advertising of Beeline

more photos here

1st OpenCoffee Riga impressions

So we had a very interesting meeting of people with strong interest in the development of internet projects in Latvia. I am pleased to find new friends and looking forward to the next meeting.

1st Open coffee in Riga will take place in Sunset Bar, on Wednesday, July 30th

More information (in Russian) here

RIGA – KAZANTIP 2008

Tomorrow, on July 26th, will be the day, when the annual craziness erupts again in the Crimean village of Popovka, which becomes home to the 16th year of kaZantip for the period from 26 of July till the end of August. I’ve already been to Z Republic last year, and it impressed me so much, that this year I decided to go again, for the grand opening of the 16th year of the festival.

What is kaZantip? It is a month of 24 hour nonstop music on almost 10 dance floors. It is Z republic populated by Z citizens.  It is state within a state with its own constitution, the president, ministers, visas and (the guarding) angels. It is freedom. It is a lot of fun, sun, music, love and happiness, referred to as “ЩАСТЬЕ”. It is Russian Goa… No wait, it is much, much better than any club event you ever been to.

More information is here, alongside with the photos and videos from previous years of Kazantip.

The price of admission to the independent state have been growing steadily each year, and 2008 is not exception in this respect. This year it is rumored to be 100-120 EUR for a multivisa or some 70 EUR for a single entry. Compare this to 85 EUR a year before for a multivisa, and you see that popularity of Kazantip is growing, and lifting prices with it too. Moreover, it is not unusual for the price of viza to be some 50% higher for the opening and closing events, and this is going to affect me directly, since I am there for the opening. Prices for living there depend on the desired level of comfort, going from 5-10$ for the bed in the old village hut, all the way up to 60-100 EUR for a double with air conditioning. Food and drinks still cheap in Popovka, but inside the kaZantip area, they have already reached 10$ for a glass of Cola with traces of Red Label. It is not unusual to see some party goers bring a backpack with essentials, buy only a single entry visa and stay within confines of the “Z Republic that never sleeps” for days and even weeks. Meeting the sunrise on the shore among wasted dancers is acceptable, just remember that tents are not allowed.

My bags are packed. GPS and brains switched off. 3 day of ЩАСТЬЕ are waiting for me.

Just checking how Ovi picture embedding works with Blogger

Truly mobile life

From Future Perfect - a blog by Nokia specialist, who is travelling the world to find out how different cultures use mobile phones and improve Nokia interfaces accordingly.

Hitmen

The Register writes about a woman that hired a killer for her ex husband on www.hitman.us.com. While it is nothing new that people do not have a clue about hiding their IP address, the comment to the article was much more amusing than the article itself.

2 weeks without blogging

If you look at the internet around you, everyhing is in motion, every second brings news and suprises.

Then you go for 2 weeks vacation without internet.

When you come back, it turns out that nothing really ever changes at all. :)

Going to Ukraine

I am going to spend my vacation in Ukraine, and will go there for two weeks starting from this Thursday, 19.6.

I am going by car,  route will be 2000km and will take 2 days driving in each direction. Here are 2 parts of the route.

First part is Riga - Lithuania - Poland. 845km. Plus time lost on Ukrainian border and another 140km in Ukraine to the hotel in Lutsk. I had to plan it in Google Maps. Actual navigation will be with TomTom 6.02 on Nokia N82 (Garmin XT mobile maps as backup).

2nd day will be only 900km. This one was planned in Garmin mapsource. Actual navigation will be by Garmin Mobile XT. (Nokia Maps 2.0 as backup).

There are two options for this day - going through Vinnitsa or going through Zhitomir. Both are same distance and I am trying to obtain more feedback in the excellent (russian speaking) community of autotravellers at AutoUA.

Apart from mentioned programs I still have maps of Ukraine and Ukraine largest cities in YandexMaps cache, SmartcomGPS and of course there is Google Maps mobile and MGMaps, but those require GPRS, which I will only connect when I arrived in Kherson and will buy local SIM card with unlimited GPRS.

OpenCoffee Riga 1.0 - initialization error.

This time event OpenCoffee v1.0 was postponed again due to repairs in Sunset Bar. I still think that the idea is good and Latvia web crowd will get together sooner or later.

Waiting impatiently for a new meeting time announcement on http://opencoffeeclub.lv/

1st OpenCoffee meeting in Riga, tomorrow evening

UPDATE!!! Sunset bar is still under reconstruction. New meeting place will be announced today. Stay tuned.

First OpenCoffee in Riga, will take place in Sunset Bar, at 18:00. This is open discussion about Web 2.0 issues, challenges and ideas. It is also a great opportunity to get acquainted with local Web 2.0 crowd. I unfortunately cannot participate this time, but hope to see it online, thanks to Dik who will translate tomorrow meeting using his Nokia N82 and Qik. Link to translation is here. Also embedded into this post below.

Evolution of mobile phones since 1985

Truly amazing, nostalgic, and mouth watering video. Must see.

Human-to-laptop interface device.

Or is it INTRAface device? Or INTOface? Use for added warmth and privacy in public areas. Priceless.

Nokia phones - built for combat

I was in exploration mode today, and went through several Nokia related blogs. I subscribed to

The Nokia Guide

The N82 Blog

Symbian in Motion (Symbian in Motion)

Nokia Creative

There was a lot of useful posts over last half a year on all of this blogs, but the one that I wanted to share was on IntoMobile

While it begins with overview of Handy Task manager, it ends with an offer of several free licenses for creative commenters who would come up with the best suggestion for a usability improvement on the S60 phones. I do not know who won, since I fell under table screaming and laughing after reading this post by anonimous Andrew.

+1, Andrew. That's what I want as a function too.

Friday fun: Guy Kawasaki tortures Steve Ballmer on stage

This week's "geek fun" crown definitely goes to the Guy vs. Steveb@microsoft.com (or stevenb@microsoft.com , was it?)

The video is long. In fact is, it is one hour long, but I found it worth every minute of it. They touch on Bill's departure, Yahoo bid, Xbox, Facebook, Vista failure in the marketplace, Macbook Air, Silverlight2, Firefox vs IE8, etc.

via  Guys' blog How to Change the World

UPDATE: would you believe, Guy himself visited a trackback link to this blog, and pointed out a spelling mistake. Fixed now. Danke, Guy.

My silent PC solution

My PC have never been silent enough,  but since installing 4 SCSI disks it became too loud. Luckily, there was storage room behind my hometheater screen, so, after some thinking and studying prices of SSD drives (the best one at the moment are from Mtron, 800 EUR gives you 16GB of lightning fast (120 Read, 100 Write MB/s)), I decided that it is cheaper and easier to go the low tech way, i.e. drill a hole in a wall for power, HDMI and some USB cables and move PC to a room where it will not be heard, no matter how loud it is.

First, power cable went through the wall.

Then, all the rest -video connection, ethernet, printer and 2 USB extenders for wireless Logitech mouse and keyboard.

After connecting all cables, turning PC on, booting Vista and testing that everything works, it is time to put my bike where it used to be in the storage room.

Now, back to enjoying a totally silent and wireless setup of my home-theater / gaming rig.

   

And last thing, now I do not use "shut down" option when I want to switch off my computer. I use "sleep" only. To Microsoft's credit, there is an option, to wake up the system with USB mouse or keyboard. And it works flawlessly even with wireless keyboard. Voila! No need to go to the server room to push that button.

Weekend fun: Smart home appliances

 

UMPC, Scotch, Habanos

Saturday night. It is time to put gadgets aside and turn to other pleasures. Habanos, the best cigars out there. Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No.2 and Cohiba Siglo VI. Macallan single malt scotch whisky. 10 years old. Cask strength (58.4%Vol). Last comparative shot before uncorking and lighting up. Bye.

The all-in-one PDA will never happen

Just as I as I wrote some time ago here UMPC cannot replace my laptop yet, Shaun from Palm247 echoes my concern about viability of all-in-one device in his article The all-in-one PDA will never happen

an excerpt:

"... In reality, the physical restraints of a phone make long periods of office work almost impossible because the keyboard is too small or the screen is unable to display enough information at any one time. Many of us look at new devices and probably think “This is the one!” This could be the device that will enable me to actually work away from the office, but it never is. There are always new smartphones hitting the market that claim to let you “take your office with you” and they are not exactly lying. It is true that you can edit documents on a smartphone and that you can send and receive email, but just as I would not want to play snooker on a 2 foot x 1 foot table, I do not really want to do lots of work on my phone..."