Navelfluff tells you the truth, even if it hurts.

Friends from abroad may have some problems understanding why a seemingly sane finlander would fill his car with family, food and clothing to fit a small army, go to a hut that doesn’t have electric heating, running water, radio, television or landline telephone, and then call it vacation. And enjoy it immensely, i may add. But we finns do. We call the place Lande, or Mökki, or Stugan … or Pönde (if we’re from Stadi, which in this case we are).

Stugan is the nicest place on Earth you can be on vacation. To compensate for other airborn entertainment, you have the mosquitoes, and you have them a lot (those missing computer games might enjoy smacking those b@stards to take care of the withdrawal symptoms). Heating is with wood, and that goes for the sauna heting as well. Man, there’s nothing like a wood-heated sauna (and a beer, and a dip in the lake, and then back to the sauna. Repeat until satisfied, lather, rinse, drip dry and then back to the hut for a sausage and the wife’s half-a-beer she didn’t want).

Not having all those techno-gadgets like a telephone line or a teevee doesn’t mean you don’t have Internet. After all, this is Finland. In my case, i have my PDA and cell phone, interconnected with Bluetooth and Internet-connected with GPRS. So i can read blogs, check my mail and compare the different weather reports to reality, and other important things.

One thing that shocked me was this. Using the PDA as client, Hotmail is way more usable than Gmail. Yup. Hotmail has this nifty, built-in and magical mobile mode that isn’t really advertized anywhere (except on the “coming soon” page) which scales down very nicely. Gmail on the other hand calmly informs me that my browser isn’t supported by Gmail. Tough cookies.

OK, so i know that Gmail is still “beta” but to compare, Hotmail doesn’t even mention that they sport “mobile representation” of their content.

Yet, my sympathies are with Gmail and i hope they get handheld devices like the pocket pc included in their list of supported devices soon. That would be yet another reason to use their service.