If you want to meet up, I will be at the Mobile World Congress today, and probably on Thursday & Friday too. You can ping me on Twitter or leave a comment. I’ll be bringing my new business card along, I guarantee you won’t get another one like it from anyone at the Congress! This is a preview, I’ll be posting the story and design behind it in a couple of days:
Today the 2009 Mobile World Congress got started in Barcelona. I was planning a couple of visits, but they got postponed at the last minute, so I went on a tour. Most impressive was the new iMate 810-F. This has to be the most rugged smartphone I have ever seen – with impressive specs, such as GPS, full QWERTY keyboard, QVGA display, a 624MHz CPU, 2Mpx camera, Bluetooth, and WiFi. And it also stands ketchup, salt, orange juice, and an array of crud and produce that was thrown at it live. Then, the demonstrator dropped the phone into a water bucket and washed it. He “rinsed” it by throwing it onto the stage, and he later faked tripping up and stepping on the phone. Finally, he picked it up and dropped it into a fish bowl while playing a video clip. In all, very impressive indeed. Yours for around $699, available in 3-4 weeks (got this straight from an iMate rep).
There wasn’t really anything else that caught my eye, other than the bigger stands being considerably more modest than years past, such as Motorola, Nokia, SonyEricsson, and other big players. They were also notably barren of any sort of freebie, not even leaflets! Congress tip for freebie hunters: go to Hall 2, the exhibitors there have tons of stuff.
If you are in Barcelona and want to grab a coffee, drop me a line in the comments.
While inside the conference you have to pay for WiFi, you could surf for free thanks to the Whisher ‘Red Bird’, which carried a mobile hotspot with a 3.8Mbps 3G connection.
The signal was encrypted, and we provided the password on flyers handed out by the bird. After three days, we had a total of 87 people connected through this hotspot, which we think is a pretty good number! There was certainly always people waiting around outside, without much else to do than check email or surf the web for a while.
Being based in Barcelona means I get to visit the Mobile World Congress without having to manage a logistics nightmare. Some visitors are staying at hotels over 100 miles away, and commuting every day to the event and back, it is really that busy. Everyone who means anything in the mobile world will be here, so if you’re in town and want to get together for a coffee or a beer (well, a beer and a diet coke, I don’t drink) and talk about wireless technology and how nice the weather is over here, drop me a line in the comments. Oh, and look for something weird around the entrance…there will be a little surprise from Whisher!
