Season's greetings

Sending out e-Christmas cards to my friends has been a tradition of mine for something like 10 years already and the card has always contained a drawing I have made (If you're interested, there's more of my art at my homepage). This is my second year when I have used a Wacom Bamboo drawing board to make the drawing directly to a digital format. The subject of the picture this year is the old town hall of Rauma, my lovely home town.

I only wish we had this much of snow. Last year at this time we had plenty - this year: nada. But let's not let the lack of snow turn our spirits down, ok? =) I wish my blog readers a very pleasant and joyful Christmas and all the best for the coming year!

Warm wishes, - Juho

Hello from Dubai!

I returned from a short vacation in Dubai few days ago. The trip was a success since I finally got to visit Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world (on my previous trips to Dubai, it was closed).

Not going to talk much about the trip itself, but I can say that my new mobile phones, HTC Radar and Nokia Lumia 800 both with WP 7.5 were in active use. The Lumia 800 was my phone/back-up camera on the trip. The green tint is present in many of the photos taken in mixed-artificial light, but otherwise the quality of the photos is good, although in very dark they turn bit blurry. Despite some hard-time focusing, the HD 720p video in the Nokia is very impressive in quality!

HTC Radar worked as my Wi-Fi connector/poolside gadget/Angry Birds console during flights and did that job extremely well. I think it had way better battery life than the one of Lumia 800 (not sure how much the mobile network activity drained it's battery, though). When talking about pictures, HTC Radar had the color balance almost always correct + the Panorama shot mode was really a nice feature to capture some amazing landscapes in Dubai!

Check out the image albums below to see some photos from the trip. You can find the 720p HD (sample) videos shot with Nokia Lumia 800 from my YouTube account.

Dubai 2011 mobile photos taken with Nokia Lumia 800

Dubai 2011 mobile photos, taken with HTC Radar

Nokia Lumia 800 unboxing pictures

Quick note on Nokia Lumia 800

Multiple efforts later I found an unlocked Nokia Lumia 800 available on Amazon Germany and this week, finally, the phone found it's way to me. Once upon I saw the design of N9 embedded with a neat, growing ecosystem I knew it was the phone I've got to have and just couldn't wait until next year for it to go on sale here in Nokia's homeland of Finland.

The device is just as beautiful and elegant as I expected, and WP7 looks and feels absolutely brilliant on it. But the phone has some lacks too. The most annoying thing to me is an odd green tint that appears when taking pictures, especially indoors. I hope it will be fixed with a software update. Also the gorgeous screen of the Lumia 800 has it's pros and cons, but I'll write more about them and other things once I've had more time with phone.

I am taking the Lumia 800 on vacation with me, along with my HTC Radar so hopefully I can have some true "field tests" with both phones, especially by photographing and sharing some moments to my fellows back home.