Krista and I just got back from a 2 week holiday to Estonia, Latvia and Finland.

Fun trip (photos up on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/ivo.salmre?v=photos).  

It was my fourth trip to Estonia, third to Finland and first trip to Latvia.

One comic note about Helsinki: It is basically impossible to find a payphone in that city. As Krista and I were planning on buying SIM cards when we got to Estonia, we were phoneless for the day and a half in Helsinki. Mostly this was fine, but we had a need to make a single phone call to Estonia to let Krista’s folks know when and where we were planning on arriving via ferry. Additionally some of our luggage did not make it over to Helsinki on our flight, requiring some follow up with the airport as we had booked no hotel in advance where we might request luggage delivery to. These are the perils of no longer making plans in advance – spontaneity and procrastination require rapid communication.

Once you are in a hotel with wi-fi…Skype + laptop is the clear answer.  That worked fine for the lost luggage coordination, as well as calls out of the country. However the next day, we checked out, left the bags and laptop at the hotel for the day, and went off to see the city and arrange a ferry-tickets to Tallinn for the evening. The need to make that one phone-call to Estonia presented itself again.

Asking people in Helsinki where one might find a pay-phone elicited more-or-less the same response as inquiring as to where one might find the nearest needle exchange. People quickly reappraised the seemingly normal (if jet-lagged) people standing in front of them and backed away ever so slightly. It was suggested that the central train station might have a pay phone somewhere (probably next to the needle exchange).

Off we went to the central train station to find the elusive payphone. At this point we were curious what this phone might look like. Would it be a standard Nokia cell-phone tethered to a wall with a cable? That’d be fine. A Skype kiosk of some sort…also welcome. An old-style standard “pay phone”?

None of the above.  What we found was a bizarre and almost unusable cobbled together web-browser/pay-phone combo. The phone use consisted of an actual internet browser page, with the image of a cell-phone inside it (hokey, but OK). However, to press the buttons one had to manually drag the on-screen mouse pointer over each button, and then kind-of double-tap on each small cell-phone screen button to register the digit. Bolted to the side of all of this was an old-style pay-phone handset. And yes, it took only coins (plenty of them). It looked like someone's college project, cobbled together in a weekend.  After we spent 10 minutes figuring the mysteries of this system, we ended up coaching the baffled middle-aged visitor from Bulgaria next to us on its usage and gave him our remaining 1.46 euro credit – or something along those lines.

The moral of the story… no payphones in Finland, don't bother.  Just befriend or beg someone on the street to use their mobile phone, its way more rational and dignified.

Estonia and Latvia are full of iPhones. A subtle, but big surprise for me was to see the immense popularity of the iPhone in both Estonia and Latvia, both in the core usage of the phone as well as in the usage of iPhone apps. I believe these launched with local carriers relatively recently (e.g. last 6 months, perhaps?), but they are clearly “the” phone to have for the “upwardly mobile professional” 25-45 crowd.  Given their ability to get a leading audience signed up and using the iPhone data plan (roughly comparable to what we have in the US and Canada, ~$100/month), it’s pretty clear that would be competitors (e.g. GPhone, Nokia, MS-SmartPhone) have an uphill battle to convince people that they have something new to bring to the table.  Short of someone offering a half-price monthly data-plan, it seems short-term hopeless for any competitor to win potential customers away - why would you choose anything else for the same price? As in the US, the phone’s appeal seemed to apply equally to both to male and female audiences (admittedly, my study here is purely anecdotal), again besting any other smart-phone vendor.

For us, buying SIM cards to use in our (non-iPhone, we are not that sheik) generic smart-phones proved almost comically easy. $20 at a newsstand and 10 minutes it took to be up and running with local phone numbers; instructions were printed in Estonian, Russian, English, and (possibly) German. Things should be so easy back here.