A list of Christmas wishes (for my electronic lifestyle):

(3.12.2011 - smz) More and more of my daily and business life is dominated by electronic gadgets. Here is a list of wishes for this part of my life in 2012:

First of all I wish Audi would build a decent navigation system for their cars. I drive this really nice four-wheel A4 with a 3.2 liter engine and the multi-media navigation system is less than average. I have even thought of additionally installing a cheap Tomtom navigation system to give me the exact location of a building, the side of the street or alternative routes. I already complained to AUDI and they sent me a connection cable for my iPod touch in exchange for my complaints. Does it solve my problems when I visit a new client in high heels and would love to arrive in stlye? No.

Then I wish for a standardized power supply for all laptops. In this moment (it is Saturday night and I should be cooking dinner) I have 2 Sony, 1 HP and 1 Asus laptop on the living room table. For the fun of it I put the power supplies on the bathroom scale and the combined weight is more than 4 kilograms. Please, vendors, listen to your (female) customers and spend a few bucks more on a sexy and lightweight power supply.

I then wish Apple would use open standards on their iPads. Whenever I want to take my iPad to a business meeting, I need to ask myself: did I convert my Powerpoint charts into JPEGs and are they in the correct sequence? Do I need to present a website that contains Flash? Most of the time I am in a hurry and leave the iPad in the office or at home, use my laptop instead. I use the iPad less and less ...

It would also be great if Apple was more international in their thinking. I gave an iPad as a present to my mother in Germany. My brother, who lives in Spain, and I, who lives in Switzerland, tried to set it up for her. She has no computer so we used my brother's computer and my credit card for the iTunes store. Bingo. iTunes installed itself in Spanish and we unable to remove the Spanish iTunes store. We also could not use my Swiss credit card for my mother, so we had to ask her for her credit card info - and this was meant to be a present! Awful.

I wish to subcribe to online services like Spotify and NOT login with my Facebook account. I want to order paper photos online and NOT share these uploaded images on Facebook. I want to obtain detailed weather information without login in through Facebook. I also want to buy a train ticket without giving away by birthdate and the super-exact destination of my travels. I wish I had more anonymity. I wish  Google would disclose the data records they obtain from my Android phone.

I wish I had a mobile phone that is shock-proof. How many people did I meet this year with broken screens, predominantly from HTC? I wish it had a screen that I can read in the sunlight. I wish I would find the camera button on the phone when the sun is blazing. I would also appreciate a smartphone battery that lasts more than 12 hours.

I wish my Internet provider would deliver the speed that he promised when I signed the contract. I am currently on a payment plan called "DSL max", so ironic! It gives me a download speed of 8'000 kBit/sec. I would also wish that my provider accepts AVMs FRITZbox, so that I can legally use the enhanced features of this router, like detailed performance monitoring and IP telephony, From the provider's perspective it's quite clear that he does not want to provide us with these tools ... because then you see the lousy service level, otherwise not.

I wish that Microsoft would enhance Outlook and provide proper address management. After 20 years with email we still don't have a function that automatically trasmits the email signature of an incoming email into the exact adress fields in my Outlook contacts. What a shame, an adress is a fairly standardized data element.I recieve paper mail from companies indicating changes of address, consider the cost and the energy on both sides!

I wish to book flights like in the good old times. I easily spend 1 hour to book a flight. Searching the best price, routing alternatives and coyping the info into my calendar is tedious. Who pays me to do everything myself? Printing and filing my phone bill, printing and filing my travel info, printing and filing my bank statement. I am printing and filing all the time, from train tickets to Skype invoices.

I wish my mobile phone provider would stop cheating on me. Time and again I find things on my invoice that are really strange. In October 2010 I signed a 'try and buy' contract for a data stick and returned it after one week. Since then the mobile phone company takes 12 Euros from me per month although the stick has been returned. I have been unable to stop it, since the contract was signed in a third-party shop. - And last but not least, I am still waiting for a mobile Euro-flat tariff for voice, SMS and data across all of Europe, including Switzerland. :-)