the välimäki experience

Two nights ago a good 15K tempo run at 3.50/km pace with Jari. Total was well over 20. I have tried to gather 5-15K on a daily basis meaning some 50-60K per week.

I settled with Avensis. Tried Honda Accord and Nissan Primera as well but the driving experience and high-rankings in reliability statistics made it for Toyota. My Ave is a 1999 sedan with the entry-level 1.6 engine and AC as the only relevant option. It has 144 000 kilometers on the dash so far. In short, nothing spectacular.

Sold my BMW 540 two nights ago. It went to the right address: a self-help mechanic who plugged in his laptop and analyzed the memory of the car before purchasing…

My car owner history is in some ways rather special:

• Lincoln Town Car 1987, 5.0 V8
• Oldsmobile Cutlass 1973, 5.7 V8
• Chevrolet Corvette 1986, 5.7 V8
• Jeep Grand Cherokee 1995, 4.0 I6 (the only six!)
• Jeep Grand Cherokee 1999, 4.7 V8
• BMW 540 1995, 4.0 V8

Yesterday I had a test drive with a Toyota Avensis. It looks like my days with big gas guzzlers are history…

I’ve been slowly started to run again. About 50-60K per week. Now I’m trying to increase the mileage towards the 80-100K range. Two times +20K so far after the marathon. Today, I measured some Ks at the home route: 3.24 and 3.30. Somehow it feels like I’m out of shape… Legs are however good (there were a couple of minor issues earlier this month) so the only thing I can complain about is myself.

There’s a lot of fuss about mobile platforms at the moment. You have Apple, Google, Nokia and Microsoft (in alphabetical order) throwing in their bets. Here’s my 5 cents.

First off, I see the game as Nokia v. Apple, the market leader against the most interesting entrant in years. Google has so far nothing and Microsoft is simply not interesting.

Second, I see the critical difference to be the openness of the platform. Be careful with the official double-talk. Apple wins hands down. They are already years away from Nokia. Here’s why:

1. It’s the same proved unix you learned in the school, not some obscure Symbian with flavors
2. It’s the same proved open source tools you learned in the school, not some obscure proprietary Nokia development-toy-kit
3. It’s full root access to read-write-execute anything, not some obscure Nokia-limited access to the core system with minimum-hundred-of-bucks-year Nokia application signing

Just look at the community evolving around iPhone. No Apple support at all. Still, there are nice easy-to-use installers and hundreds of useful applications to fix what Apple left out (or did not have time or resources to include). I had perhaps one external application (C64 emulator) on my previous Communicator, mainly for testing and demo purposes. Now I have several, and all in relevant use.

You want a good example of open developer-lead innovation, look at iPhone. It lives on because that’s the nature of the community. It does not need Apple, or any other big brother, for that matter. You want a good example of a company-pumped artificial “developer ecosystem”, look at Symbian. Without Nokia, it dies.

As a Finn, I can only hope that Nokia would finally adopt their Linux-experiment (used so far only in the N800 tablet) into their latest phones. That would mean some serious investment in openness. I don’t actually see much options for them now. Opening up Symbian wouldn’t mean anything. It’s a technological dead-end.

Update 23.11: I learned from a student who sells handsets in one of the major malls in the Helsinki region that during the last six months just one customer bought an N800 and another once asked it. She sells about 20 handsets every day, half of them being the N95. Some have even asked for an iPhone even though it has been available only in the United States. – Another student noted that he had been trying to “develop” out of curiosity a hello-world application to his Nokia phone with Nokia’s tools for two days without success.