Deutsche Bahn and T-Mobile extend their traveling WiFi HotSpot service at the ICE train routes. Now, also the route Frankfurt am Main – Hanover – Hamburg is covered with WiFi internet access (“railnet”). Overall, we have WiFi internet connection within the train on most of the ICE routes in Germany:

• Dortmund – Düsseldorf – Cologne (also via Hagen and Wuppertal)
• Cologne – Frankfurt am Main Airport
• Frankfurt am Main – Stuttgart – Munich
• Frankfurt am Main – Hanover – Hamburg

The service offers laptop and especially iPhone users an internet connection even if the train travels at a maximum speed of 300 km/h – more than 180 miles per hour! Im always impressed about the quite stable and fast internet connection even when traveling that fast. And the best thing of all: as a (German T-Mobile) iPhone user you don’t even have to pay for the WiFi connection in the train!

Source/picture: Deutsche Bahn

The huge system update to Mac OS X 10.5.3 with 200 to over 400 MB resolves a lot of bugs and adds up some additional features to Leopard. Example: More digital cameras with their specific RAW-formats are supported now. Or the possibility to sync the Apple Address Book application with Google Contacts.
Great to see that WIFI stability was increased by the Apple developers.
An annoying – but resolvable – problem appeared after updating when I tried to use the time logging software TimeLog 4: All log entries within TimeLog are saved in iCal – and after upgrading to 10.5.3 my work time entries just doubled. It’s easy to fix the problem by deleting every dublicate log entry – but you better checkt the timesheet in detail before you hand it out to your customer

Steve Jobs presented a new feature of the iPhone – and also the iPod touch. Especially the iPod touch transforms into a new category of devices by adding location based services: By cooperating with Skyhook Wireless it is possible to get the own location by triangulating the signals from different WiFi-hotspots. The iPhone uses also the well known method by using the cell-ids to find the current location. It’s quite interesting, that it seems that Apple is not cooperating with the mobile network operators to get the location by cell ids and triangulation: They realized this feature by cooperating with Google. When I think of the hurdles to realize mobile Location Based Services (LBS) with the different operators … this is not a bad idea.
We really can be curious, whether the iPhone SDK will be the kickoff of a new era in LBS. Maybe Apple will also provide the iPhone web developers with the LBS-SDK Loki SDK for their web applications – that would really roll up the LBS-scene