Hotspots rock
Hotspots rock. I am now in Düsseldorf with friends and we are sitting in the Hotel bar using the Isis Hotspot that is here. It is rather expensive if you go at alone, because it costs 6 EURs for 1 hour. But then again, we found out that 4 people can surf on one card, which doesn’t make it any less expensive though because these Isis people have figured out that they can just deduct four times the usage time. Damn ;)
In general you just have to get a card with more hours for it to be less expensive and you can use it as often as you want, until the minutes are out. Actually all pretty easy I have to say. The nice thing is that the drinks are good and the music is actually very nice, making this a pleasurable experience. We might stick out a bit though with 4 laptops on the table.
It showed that I love Macs though, as we had no problem logging onto the Hotspot with nocat from the Power and iBook while the two Windows machines did have some problems. Windows Networking just didn’t like this foreign hotspot and getting an IP address automatically from that Hotspot. Pretty annoying I have to say.
It’s a great weekend though, full of deep tech talk and I am getting closer to value the importance of the XML-XSLT connection in stuff I am currently doing. This is a very powerful connection for flexibility. We are also still thinking about the entire mobile space and gaming within it, which is already rather popular for the simpler games. Phones are now getting somewhere where you can get decent games developed for them, which is obviously good. While the N-Gage might or might not be doing well for Nokia, the entire space will take off sooner or later. Nokia wants to be part of it but I am still wondering if they didn’t put too much emphasis of sticking with their general platform for the N-Gage in relation to creating something really valuable. I understand their drive for standard platforms from a business point of view. But in this case, it’s plain dangerous as they created a mediocre phone and a mediocre game platform with doing that. Let’s see how it fares out.
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