A1000blog

Great Danish 3 experience

I wrote a few posts ago that I spent a week in Denmark participating in a scouting Jamboree. I must say I was really happy being a 3 Sweden customer throughout my visit there. During the whole time I used my A1000 to feed a mobile blog from the camp. It worked smoothly, although as you can see in the blog the camera in the A1000 makes lousy pictures.

The network coverage was great. Actually I think 3 Denmark (and other operators) set up a temporary base station just for the camp ground, which hosted around 15000 people (plus another 15000 visitors on the HC Andersen day).

The camp was divided into seven subcamps. In each one of those there was a large tent. Besides general information, food, and entertainment the subcamp tents also offered around five Internet PC:s and a charging station for phones, cameras, etc. Imagine 50 cell phones visibly laying on a table without any guard! Of course I was a little nervous every second day when I had to recharge. But scouts are honest and nothing was stolen.

Before we (44 scouts and leaders in total) went to the jamboree we discussed how to do with mobile phones. Typically we do not allow the scouts to bring their mobiles (tend to get lost), but parents like to be in touch. To take care of the latter we normally bring a prepaid GSM-phone which parents and relatives could call. But , as some of you may know, if you call a Swedish mobile that is outside Sweden, the receiver (in this case our prepaid phone) has to pay for the international call. Furthermore, one of the leaders said that it was really expensive to call Sweden from Denmark. To my great pleasure it turned out that 3 Sweden let us customers call to and from Denmark for the same prices as if we were in Sweden. This includes the cost for data traffic.

One evening one of us (leaders can bring phones :-) called his wife. But, she did not want to talk because she was audiencing at the Stockholm Jazz festival. That reminded me that 3 Musik (which is for free this summer) streamed the festival. Said and done, I kicked on my A1000 and a few minutes later we sat in a small tent in Denmark - listening live to the Stockholm Jazz festival. Cool!

TypePad's customer (un)focus

I (used to) like TypePad, the weblogging service that hosts this blog. It comes with a cost, but it's worth it.

When I signed up, TypePad offered moblogging features, although in a rather limited fasion. I did not know why, but from my customer point of view TypePad has not really developed the image handling, multimedia (e.g. podcasting), or moblogging functionality for the last six months. Last week I think I found the reason why.

TypePad have "teamed up with the folks at Nokia so that moblogging to your TypePad account is now even better". The result is Nokia Lifeblog. That TypePad teams up with one (1) phone manufacturer really pisses me off. I thought I was hosted by a weblogg provider, not a Nokia player.

Note! I have nothing against Nokia, or any other make for that case. It's just the bad feelings I get when a provider focuses something else than the existing customer base. True, some of them use Nokia phones, but my guess is that the vast majority of TypePad's customers have moblogging capable phones of other makes. In any case - moblogging features have not improved a single bit for me.