antti.vilpponen.net

I complained about the battery life of my iPhone on Twitter a few months back and @randommman suggested Carat to me.

@vilpponen You need Carat carat.cs.berkeley.edu unless you already use it :)

— Jani Turunen (@randommman) April 13, 2013

The app is awesome. It’s not as finely designed as your regular consumer app, but it does the job. It pinpoints the applications and processes that are draining battery life. For example, in my case Audible is horrendous in using the iPhone battery. This is even when I have specifically closed the app from the “task manager” (or whatever you call the list of apps you have open). It still somehow leaves itself open and can drain 50% of my battery in about 3 hours.

If you’re having battery issues with iPhone – download Carat, it’s an awesome app and there’s pretty cool big data behind it too.

Haven’t blogged in ages and I need to clear my writer’s block. So here are a few photos from yesterday, mothers’ day. We spent ours outside in the woods at Kaitalampi barbecuing and later on cycling around. Awesome day, spent outside enjoying the sun.

Today, Helsingin Sanomat (largest daily in Finland), published a piece how up to half of the world’s money is in tax havens or offshore financial centres (OFCs). The story also highlighted how quickly one can setup a company in those countries.

I don’t quite understand what the point of the article was, except to somewhat put a questionable light on all those operating from OFCs. I’m sure there is a ton of illegal money, but also a lot of legally obtained money that wants to be kept safe from domestic politics.

The argument on how quickly one can set up a company in one of the OFCs is also slightly off. It highlights how effectively OFCs work and how ineffective our own society is. Companies setup in many of the OFCs need to abide to a lot more regulatory red-tape than in traditional western societies. This is the result of international regulation putting pressure on OFCs – which is a good thing, but picking speed and hinting that the only reason to setup a company quickly is to avoid taxes is opinionated and far from objective.

The reason why the article got my blood boiling is that it constantly used the term veroparatiisi (“tax paradise” in Finnish), clearly pointing how everyone operating from those countries do it to avoid taxes. This might be the obvious reason to do so, but Helsingin Sanomat misses half of the potential of a great article in only promoting one side of the debate.

The Economist wrote an excellent Special Report on OFCs this February. In one of their articles titled The good, the bad and the Ugland, the newspaper argued that many companies also use OFCs to create a neutral ground for international joint ventures. The reason for this is that organisations from separate countries are treated equally in terms of profits on their investment and are only taxed when they repatriate the money back home.

I don’t approve avoiding taxes by businesses or individuals, but the truth is – we operate in an open market economy where money will always seek the best home for it. We need to build our economies and countries in such a way that the money voluntarily wants to stay there without trying to evade into OFCs. This is far from easy, but it’s the only way to create a sustainable ecosystem where nations aren’t required to establish extensive jurisdiction to prevent money from leaving.

Instead of asking, how we can prevent companies and individuals from moving their money to OFCs – we should be asking how do we need to build our societies so that companies and individuals voluntarily want to keep more of their money in the reach of our jurisdiction?

I haven’t had the time to write about my experience with the Lumia 920 for a while, but here’s an update. Overall, I’m still very impressed with the device. There are some small issues I’ve found that differ quite a bit and do provide a challenge in some senses for people switching from the iOS ecosystem.

Calendar
This is a tough one. I’m working on a MacBook Air at home and with an iMac at work. These two machines sync each other through various file sync programs such as SugarSync. In addition to these, the computers naturally use the same Apple account info, so it syncs my calendars and todo-items on Reminders.

When taking the WP8 into use, I first ran into the problem of setting up a system to use the two ecosystems together. My current setup is that my iCloud calendars (synced between my Macs) are subscribed to my WP8 calendar that I can update on the road. Then again, my WP8 is subscribed to my iCloud calendars. Seems like a great solution, until you get to syncing.

When I change a calendar event on my iCloud calendars, it doesn’t sync / change to my WP8 phone at all. It seems like WP8 pulls in the calendar detail and then confirms it synced, without ever asking for updates on that specific calendar entry. One issue with this might be that it’s Microsoft’s Live.com service that does the syncing in between and that doesn’t understand the changed entry settings.

Surfing
The browser is of course Internet Explorer and I’ve noticed that it is perhaps the biggest difference in the way I use the phone. Firstly I had some challenges with setting up tabs and using them properly, but I then noticed that you can configure this quick button next to the address bar to specific tasks.

For some reason my phone also tries to reserve bandwidth by not loading images on some websites. I feel that there might be a setting for this, but haven’t bothered to find out.

Other than that, the browser is fast and renders websites as they should be.

Missing apps
Couple of apps I’m missing in the WP8 ecosystem are definitely Dropbox and The Economist. Not a huge showstopper, given how great the Nokia HERE application suite is. They provide everything from maps to city lenses to local public transport information (which is probably the new application for me).

In conclusion
I can still say that it’s an awesome phone despite the shortcomings, but clear improvements in other – when compared to the iPhone 4. Sound quality is definitely a big issue and I have not suffered from bad call quality since using the device, which has been quite a bit more of an issue on the iPhone. It does show Nokia has a lot of experience in designing antennas and producing world class quality solutions in the core functionalities, which some of us still forget, of the phone.

Here are some random photos I’ve shot over the weekend. Also loving WordPress’ new gallery tiling feature. The weather was awesome, even though a little cold still.

So Nokia shipped me a Lumia 920 to play around with, through their Nokia Connects program. It was supposed to have arrived yesterday already, but I had given inadequate address information so the courier wasn’t able to find me.

I have to say, I had pretty high expectations for the device as I’ve been following Windows Phone as a platform somewhat and also had some good discussions with friends about it (see my blog post here). Having used the device (it’s yellow by the way) for a couple of hours tonight, getting it setup, etc. – I have to say, I’m already impressed. It really is a breath of fresh air.

Oh and I should probably say what phone I’m currently using – iPhone 4 (been using it for 2.5 years now).

Contacts and Calendar
Right off the bat my biggest worry was not understanding how to use the phone, but getting all my data synced. I had not looked anything up in advance and decided to play along. Nokia is famous for having this “Data Transfer” feature in their phones since sliced bread. It worked so and so in the past and I definitely saw it in the application list, but immediately thought that it was meant for data sharing between Nokia phones.

I looked around for a solution to export my contacts from my MacBook Air to a file and then try to have them imported. It seemed like a lot of work so I decided to give Data Transfer a try. I paired up the devices and Lumia 920 immediately started pulling in my 850 or so contacts from the iPhone. In about 2 minutes everything was done and the basic setup for the phone (I still consider it one) was done.

Setting up my calendar wasn’t as easy, but not too difficult either. I’ve been using iCloud’s calendar due to the syncing functionality working so much better in an Apple only environment. Nokia of course relies a lot on Microsoft’s tools, being on Windows Phone, so I had to sign into my Live account and from there go to calendars. From there, I imported my iCloud exported calendar file (.ics format) to get it first working in the web based system (which is super smart of Microsoft – to keep all strings at their end and not allow device manufacturers to connect data for clients).

After the import had succeeded, the phone automatically pulled in my calendar data as I had also signed in to my Live account on the phone. Simple enough and definitely a very positive surprise for the on-boarding experience.

Apps
A lot of people have told me that WP8 doesn’t have that great of a catalogue for apps. I agree, a lot of the new innovative apps are still created for the iOS first. However, I found the most basic apps for myself very quickly; Spotify, Evernote and a couple of others. I’ve also realised that while I use a certain selection of apps I’m pretty used to a standard set of some 10-15 apps at any given time.

Some applications I was missing though are a good podcast player (I’m pretty certain there is one, but I couldn’t settle on anything yet) as well as the Economist. I listen to the audio articles of The Economist during my morning and evening commute quite a lot and it’s a great way to “read” the content when you really don’t have time to sit down in front of a magazine or newspaper as they call themselves.

I’m sure there are a couple of other apps I still need to find to get my daily routines working, but so far I’m really impressed with the initial experience.

And finally – the social networks
My first two applications I installed were Facebook and Twitter. Even without the network specific apps, you are able to follow what’s going on in your circles as the platform ties really nicely the social actions into the user experience. You have this People tile, which shows streams of notifications aggregated into one from all your social networks. You’re even able to see the latest updates from people when you view their profile. Very simple, but still so much different to how the iPhone works.

I remember hearing many talks by Marko Ahtisaari about things working in silos and how it really isn’t the best way to use the phone by always going back to the home screen to start things off. It really isn’t and one thing I really liked is that you are able to pull individual items from inside the applications to the home screen and pin them there. I was already playing around with pinning a few important Evernote notes to the home screen to keep them constantly there for quick access.

That’s about everything so far – lots more to write about (and photograph) in the coming two weeks for sure.