IntoMobile » S60 Summit 2007

Voice of S60: Phil interviews Michal Jerz of My-Symbian.com

Stefan Constantinescu — Mon, 14 May 2007 17:00:27 +0000

Finding a man who has more information about Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s communicator line will be an impossible task after you sit down and have a chat with Michal Jerz. I had the pleasure of hanging out with this guy at the S60 Summit in Madrid and am amazed that he has been maintaing a website for 8+ years!

Check out the podcast to get the scoop on how he started, where Nokia has gone from the first communicator all the way to the current E90 and if the switch to S60 was a good or bad idea.

While we’re on the topic of Michal and communicators: Don’t forget to check out his E90 review!

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Mobile Review interviews Mikko Rontynen

Stefan Constantinescu — Fri, 11 May 2007 23:10:51 +0000

GPS, power consumption, Symbian 9.5, S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, it is all in this interview between Eldar Murtazin of Mobile Review and Mikko Rontynen, Head of S60 Platform Marketing at Nokia (NYSE: NOK).

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S60 Summit: The hardware and platform

Stefan Constantinescu — Thu, 03 May 2007 09:46:59 +0000

Rafe’s write ups are rich and detailed as usual, read what he has to say about all the booths he managed to visit.

Favorite line: We’ll be covering Feature Pack 2 in more detail in a future article.

A complete article dedicated to FP2, I can’t wait!

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S60 Summit 2007 Coverage: A huge collection of links

Stefan Constantinescu — Thu, 03 May 2007 07:57:57 +0000

I think he pretty much used Technorati to find everything.

His list is complete.

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Voice of S60: Round table discussion at the S60 summit

Stefan Constantinescu — Thu, 03 May 2007 05:09:39 +0000

Straight from Phil’s blog:

On the final day of the S60 Summit, Rafe Blandford of AllAboutSymbian.com, Matt Miller of ZDNet / Geek.com / MobileTechRoundup, Michal Jerz of My-Symbian.com, Stefan Constantinescu of RingNokia.com,
and I all piled into my little hotel room for a round table discussion.
Some of the greatest minds in the mobile industry all on one bed! It
was a great chat, we covered the event, the latest S60 devices,
widgets, iPhone, the possibility of a touch UI, Feature Pack 2, and
more. Enjoy!!

Download in MP3 64kbps Format | (33:20 – 15.5 MB)
Download in AAC+ 24kbps Format | (33:20 – 5.8 MB)

From left: Matt Miller, Rafe Blandford, Michal Jerz, Stefan Constantinescu

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More S60 Summit 2007 coverage starting to come out

Stefan Constantinescu — Wed, 02 May 2007 05:44:02 +0000

Part 1 of Rafe’s S60 Summit may not interest you guys, he covers Samsung devices.

Part 2 however is the operators role in pushing S60. Summary: We want to hit the mid priced market, but S60 based devices haven’t reached that price point yet.

A photo gallery is also included so you can get an idea of what is happening:

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S60 Summit Day 2: The show floor, presentations and good bye

Stefan Constantinescu — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 03:36:08 +0000

Very long post, lots of pictures too. In order to conserve bandwidth I am not showing the complete article on the Ring Nokia (NYSE: NOK) homepage.

Please click on "Continue reading" below to enjoy the full blog post.

If you have been directly linked then please ignore this message!

S60 Summit Day 0 coverage

S60 Summit Day 1 coverage

Day 2 couldn’t have started out any better, I had breakfast with Eldar Murtazin of Mobile-Review. We chatted about everything, with topics ranging from what was currently happening in our industry, what we wanted to see in the future and my curiosity of the dark side: Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) phones, the K800i to be exact. The main topic of our discussion centered around music phones, in particular how Nokia hasn’t made anything that really competes with Sony’s Walkman line and how nothing on the market is even close to matching the iPod experience. He is a very intelligent writer and I hope I run into him again in the future.

After that it was time to go back to my hotel room, put on my suit, slap my game face on and hit the conference.

I got to the auditorium about 10 minutes early. They haven’t finished setting up yet, so I snapped some pictures:

Matti VÃ¤nskÃ¤ began with a keynote welcoming us to the event and a summary of what we were going to be hearing today:

Ilari Nurmi (link to PDF of complete presentation) gave the first presentation, he had to take Lee Williams’ spot on a moments notice due to the birth of his son! Congratulations Lee!

Ilari was the first to tell us that over 100 million S60 devices have shipped at which point the crowd gave him a round of applause. Next we went thru all the technologies that let developers bring their ideas over to S60. Open C was enabling companies like Oracle to port their database application in no time. The open source G Streamer solution would enable plugin support for the multimedia player and future development tools will be built on eclipse.

Now it was time to bring widgets onto the stage:

Ilari did a great job explaining what widgets are and how they will impact our industry, but I would have been more impressed if the torch was passed to Ganesh Silverman. His presentation at the press lunch was priceless and really made a lot of people understand what Nokia is really trying to push. I even told Ganesh and Phil that they should get together and shoot a video, it was honestly that good. My sideways N95 video is of poor quality, but if you just listen to the audio you can understand why I’ve come to this conclusion:

Click To Play

I’m upset that as a S60 3rd Edition user I can’t try out widgets the day they are released as they are only meant for FP2 and above devices. It feels like a little bit of a slap in the face to the 100 million S60 users out there.

I also think that widgets should be hosted in a centralized repository to make finding and downloading them much easier for the end user. It would be even better if a program sat on the users phone which enabled him to search the complete S60 widget database, see what the most popular ones are, search, etc. Ganesh assured me we would get more information about this as we get closer to the release of Feature Pack 2 devices.

Next up was JosÃ© Antonio Moujadami (link to PDF of complete presentation) from TelefÃ³nica:

He probably got in trouble for calling S60 "Series S60," but his presentation was truly an eye opener for someone like me who is used to operators in America putting your testicles in a vice once you sign a contract; TelefÃ³nica really gets it. They want to be open and are using the power of Open C to port projects from SourceForge and Freshmeat to their platform.

He mentioned the power of the web run time that will be in Feature Pack 2. This is the engine that will enable widgets, but it would also be wise if other mobile operating system adopted it. AJAX, CSS and Java script are all standards based technologies and the faster our industry can agree on standards the faster operators can get devices out to you.

He used the word "openess" to describe the shift that is currently happening in our industry when it comes to data, but I’m still going to tell my readers: only buy unlocked, unbranded devices!

Operators play a huge role in Nokia’s bottom line, but I strongly subscribe to the philosophy that they should only be offering services, not devices. They are merely pipes.

The next speaker is one that gave me such a strong epiphany that I pretty much ignored his presentation and spent the next 30 minutes thinking. Kamran Kordi (link to PDF of complete presentation) from T-Mobile:

What started out as a simple question, got my mind racing:

"We love the S60 browser, but S60 isn’t modular enough for us to replace it with our own solution. Can you help us S60?"

Think about that for a second. S60 powers Nokia’s Multimedia Computers, a marketing term I loathe with every bone in my body, and Kamran just proved it to be false once again.

Windows XP will let me use any application I want for web browsing, any application I want for viewing txt files, any application for accessing [insert file type]. As open as S60 is, it is not modular enough. Number 3 on my list of 20 Nokia New Year’s Resolutions states:

S60 needs to become componentized
in order to offer the best experience for users. One shouldnâ€™t need an
entire firmware upgrade just to upgrade the music player application,
or the web browser. The core of S60 should remain the core and all
other peripheral applications should be made into components; similar
to what Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) does with Windows XP embedded. I use Opera for Mobile
because Iâ€™ll never be able to use the web browser you have locked in to
S60v3FP1.

I want to take this concept even further. Symbian OS 9.5 brings us a SQL database, how can S60 use this to their advantage? Modularize everything!

If there is a developer out there who thinks that they can write a better PIM application than the one in S60 (shouldn’t be too hard, zing!) then why not store all the users data in this new SQL database and give them the API’s they need to write an application that will become the S60 default handler for those tasks?

I can tell Windows XP to play my MP3 files with Winamp and not with Windows Media Player.

I can tell Windows XP to view my JPG files with Irfanview and not with … whatever their image viewing application is.

Same concept can be said about the phone book application, if a developer out there thinks they can write a better phone book then why not let them replace the one in S60?

Store all the users data inside this SQL database and give developers the proper mechanisms to access and modify this data. Build applications that ship with the phone by default, but can easily be replaced if the user or operator so chooses.

I have Opera installed on my E61i because I can’t enjoy the features that the later version of the S60 browser brings. Opera on the other hand is just a sis file I can install whenever they come out with an update. The problem is Opera will never handle links sent to me in emails or text messages, S60 is not smart enough for that.

Thank you Kamran for opening up my eyes to yet another complaint I can relay to all my Nokia friends. I bet what you want will mean another code break.

At this point we had a lunch break and it was time to hit the expo hall. The first picture I took was of the latest S60 devices of course!

I was quick to make the observation that one of the products was mislabeled and they had the problem resolved in less than 5 seconds. The 5700 was the 3250 for only a few minutes

Here is the recently announced 6120 Classic:

Damn, left the flash on! I need to get a camera with image stabilization because I just end up getting blurry shots like this:

Here is a quick video running thru the dimensions of the device:

The E90, the very reason why men around the world will start donating plasma, selling sperm and getting a second job was on display:

For those who want to know, it was running this firmware:

Next up was Sysopendigia, the same people who are responsible for the Remote Device Access service that makes developers lives easer:

Forum Nokia was showing off the PC version of the Download! client that we all have on our phones. I wish I could have received more information, but the lines were so long I didn’t want to stand around aimlessly. If there is one complaint about the S60 Summit is that it isn’t long enough. Tying the speakers into a cramped schedule and then giving the audience less than 3 hours to view 60+ booths views results in utter chaos!

Who came up with the idea that lunch and drinks should be served in the expo hall too? It was complete madness and the room was poorly ventilated to handle all that traffic. Me and Michael from My-Symbian had to get out of there for some fresh air.

Back to the show, I got to stand next to the all powerful TI OMAP 3420. This little guy could boot S60 in 5 seconds. Yes, 5 bloody seconds!

Don’t believe me about that 5 second claim? Check out the video below; I apologize for the sideways angle, there was literally no room to stand at the booth so I just propped my N95 in front of the motherboard, hit record, and asked the guy if he could reboot. We seriously needed more showroom floor at the expo:

If the TI guys could do me favor, could you record S60 booting up in your labs? You certainly have a ton of people who care about this very topic. I doubt anyone at TI reads my blog, but I may as well ask

Next to TI was STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) showing off their Nomadik StN 8815 chip. The presenter got upset when I asked him what the cost of his chip was in comparison to the competition, I don’t know why:

All the reference board designers right next to each other, I wonder if they were friends or foes. Here is Samsung’s S3C6400:

The TI OMAP was running around 444 MHz, this Samsung chip was running at 533 MHz and the guy at STM looked pissed off at me so I didn’t bother asking him.

The future is clear however, video will be a huge reason why the processing power of our devices will increase. Everyone was showing off VC1 and h.264 encoded videos playing at 720p! The processing power is there, but what about LCD manufactures? We definitely need more DPI!

Coffee break is over, time to go back to the speakers!

I felt really bad for Chengmin Liu (link to full PDF presentation) of Tencent. I lived in NYC for a decade so broken English is nothing new to me. This guy however … not a single word made sense. The company is worth over $6 Billion USD and if it wasn’t for the powerpoint slides I would have no clue what they do: Tencent created QQ, one of the most popular IM clients in China:

Shaun Collins of CCS Insights was next, link to full PDF of presentation:

He did a great job of explaining where we have come from in the mobile industry and the steps operators need to take to succeed in the future. His entire speech could be summed up in this one amusing slide:

In order for operators to win they need to create compelling services, deliver a lot of bandwidth, make things cheap and most importantly gain the customers trust.

Easier said than done, but it’s good that someone was there to deliver this message to the operators attending.

Next up (link to presentation) was someone who I’ve been eager to see since having a round of drinks with him at the NYC Evening with S60 event, ladies and gentlemen I present to you Mikko RÃ¶ntynen:

His job was to tell people how FP2 is enabling S60 to be embraced by the masses with easier features such as the unified messaging client, third soft key and the fact that it requires less horsepower to run which in turn allows cheaper devices to be made. His talk was obviously targeted to executives, but don’t be fooled! He gave a demo of FP2 in NYC that resulted in a massive crowd circling around him and asking questions every 5 seconds. Mikko is pure geek, pure Finn and metal as hell. He even let me use his FP2 running 6290 at the NYC after party, shame I didn’t run into him at the fiesta.

After he was finished it was time for lunch, but before going their Eldar wanted to show me this really slick Samsung device. The built in "mega search" application was much more impressive than Nokia’s search solution:

While eating lunch Ganesh took the stage and gave a presentation about widgets. The best part was when he built one right in front of our eyes! I don’t know how successful widgets on the mobile will be in the future, but after this talk I was definitely rooting for them. He made a very valid point that AJAX, Java script and HTML are much easier than Symbian.c++ and that the second phase of widgets will interface with the S60 API’s:

After lunch was finished we were split up into groups and given guided tours around the S60 exhibition halls. It was nice to skip the lines and get a group of people working together to ask someone a question. I know some people think "group think" is a bad idea, but that is only true when the people participating are poor listeners. Questions are equally important, if not more so, than the answers. Rafe or Matthew could have asked something that I would have never thought of bringing up and in turn it would cause me to build on top of their inquires.

Ganesh (Head of Marketing for the S60 Browser) was leading my group so don’t worry folks, I reminded him several times that the web browser needs to be ripped out of the OS and made into a separate SIS file so we can all enjoy the fine work the browser team has put into one of the best mobile browsers on the planet.

After our tour was over there were two three more speeches to be heard, I didn’t take proper notes or pictures of the "New Services Enabling New Revenues" by Doug Ortega of Handango presentation nor the "Location-based Service Mash-ups Using Maps" by Michael Halbherr of Nokia, but I can do my best from memory:

The Handango presentation was hands down the funniest due to a disgruntled person during the Q&A session who was quite pissed off about the fact that "you guys lump everything written on top of Symbian into one category called … Symbian." He then added: "How do you feel about the fact that you sell applications that will simply not work to customers?"

My whole row was nearly in tears and trying to cover it up.

Michael, the next presenter, mentioned Nokia’s effort into becoming the leader of GPS based services. I can tell you this right now, the $300 Samsung devices that my fellow employees sell for Helio have GPS that takes less than 15 seconds to lock on. Does it use A-GPS? Probably. We use a custom version of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps that interfaces with the GPS chip built in. That is the sole feature in those phones that makes me wonder why Nokia couldn’t have built something a little more competent than the 2 minute lock on solution that is the N95.

The last speech (link to full presentation) was given by Nokia employee Heikki Norta. He highlighted where Nokia is going with S60 and which devices will be the main drivers of growth for the operating system:

He indirectly said that Nokia Mobile Phones division, also known as the people who make S60 devices that are not apart of the E or N series, would come out with 8 phones next year.

In 2008 Nokia wants to make GPS mainstream and in 2009 television in your hand. These are some pretty hard goals to achieve, but if anyone can do it, it has got to be Nokia!

After the speeches ended Nokia gave away a N95 and everyone pretty much retired to their hotel rooms after a long and exhausting day.

A few hours later we had our last dinner together: Matthew and his wife, Rafe, Michael, Phil, Sara (recently joined the S60 Online Marketing Team; congrats!) and I had an epic meal and conversation. Half of our party couldn’t take being awake any longer but Phil, Michael, Sara and I stayed awake until 04:30.

Waking up three hours later to catch a cab to the airport was probably the most challenging task I was given at the S60 summit, luckily I caught my plane and now I’m sitting here wondering what new devices I’m going to be seeing in the future.

Thank you Nokia for inviting me and paying for the hotel and airfare.

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More S60 Summit 2007 coverage is up

Stefan Constantinescu — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:40:35 +0000

Phil posts his day 2 impressions and Matthew has an extensive photo gallery with detailed coverage.

I just came back from the gym and am going to get busy writing my day 2 coverage right now!

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All the PDF’s from all the presentaions at the S60 summit are online

Stefan Constantinescu — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:56:30 +0000

I wish Nokia (NYSE: NOK) would have recorded these presentations and shared them on their website, but all I have to share are PDF documents.

Enjoy!

Coverage of the presentations goes up tomorrow.

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S60 Summit 2007: Failed PR event according to Richard Bloor

Stefan Constantinescu — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:54:02 +0000

I take offense to comments made about me in this article, but a valid point has been made: Should Nokia (NYSE: NOK) have made more announcements at the summit and why wasn’t the event covered in greater detail?

The summit wasn’t meant to be a PR launch platform, but a gathering of people in the mobile industry to get the scoop on where S60 is right now and how other people are using it. This was more of an executive’s event than an outright techno-news-explosion, but isn’t that why we have 3GSM?

It would have been nice to see some phone announcements being made or major revisions to the S60 OS, but that wasn’t the point Richard. If you really want to see the powerpoint slides that we [the press] saw then feel free to look at my Scribd account.

My coverage is going up in bits and pieces and everything should be published by tomorrow night.

Back to your question: What was the point of the S60 Summit?

For people in the S60 ecosystem to connect with other members within the same industry. Nothing fancy, nothing really crazy to blog about, but you would be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks the summit was a waste of time. Yes we all enjoyed ourselves, yes Nokia could have made it more about themselves, but it was made very clear to us from the start that this is more of a gathering than an actual conference. It wasn’t about "what to blog," but more like "who to meet."

Why don’t you stop by in 2008 and see if you can muster a better job than the rest of the blogosphere? I’m sure you can, but you would be missing the entire point of the event.

Connecting with people.

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Video: Brief coverage of the 6120 Classic

Stefan Constantinescu — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 02:48:39 +0000

Shot this at the summit:

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S60 Summit Day 1: The Prado and Fiesta

Stefan Constantinescu — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 02:33:51 +0000

S60 Summit Day 0 coverage

Rafe didn’t arrive yet, I knew no one in the hotel, what should I do until the S60 Fiesta at 17:00? Go to one of Europe’s finest museums of course!

Madrid is a very urban city so it was nice to come across these two trees on my way to the metro:

A 15 minute ride later and I reached my destination:

While I was in line I managed to snap a picture of a famous artist, Goya:

At this point I couldn’t take out my Canon without looking like I was about to take a picture of something; stick the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95 on silent mode however and you can be a pretty sneaky guy. Check out some of the shots I took:

I prefer sculpture to art and was rather unimpressed by the small collection. There was only one security guard watching these majestic pieces of marble so sneaking around and taking pictures was pretty easy.

Every time I tried to grab a picture of a painting, I failed:

Taken on a Canon, can’t you tell by the ultra bright Xenon flash?

This guy was doing a damn good job making a copy of the painting in the back ground. I spotted a few other people doing the same thing.

Security walked in front of me when taking this picture. You can tell how short this guy was:

Three floors of art later, I was in the mood to take a scroll thru the park. The Royal Garden was right across the street. All of the following pictures were taken on a Nokia N95.

I noticed that Steve Litchfield always takes pictures of flowers or videos in his garden, so I thought why not show him a reason to attend the 2008 S60 Summit?

I even ran into some ducks:

I was looking at my watch and quickly realizing that I had to leave. The fiesta was going to take place! We all got these hot pink wrist bands. I don’t know what purpose they served, but I’m definitely going to keep mine for the memories it has given me:

We all hop on board the buses and the excruciating 45 minute drive begins. When we arrive however I really get the sense of how packed the event was:

The party began with a 45 minute horse show that was rather … let’s just say I prefer it would have been shorter:

Watch the guy on the white horse, he falls off:

After all was said and done the actual party began. It was very dark so none of my shots came out right, except for this leg of pork:

I had a great time and Nokia staff certainly knew how to party.

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A few words about a few good men

Stefan Constantinescu — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 10:04:32 +0000

This is a picture I snapped on my N95 at the Museo del Prado in Spain while the security guard wasn’t looking. The man is Caesar Augustus.

The history of the Roman Empire is something that has always fascinated me, even as a little boy. I remember my first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and seeing these 3 meter tall men who looked powerful, honorable and simply perfect. Around that time I started (more like attempted) body building, but that isn’t important right now. What is important is that the philosophy of the Roman empire was to understand, learn and return to Rome the various cultures of the countries they conquered. Knowledge was a currency more valuable than any material wealth. Learning was celebrated.

Before the S60 summit took place Phil Schwarzmann contacted me and asked if I would like to go. I wanted to, but it is something I couldn’t afford. This wasn’t important to Phil, he had a list of several bloggers whom Nokia (NYSE: NOK) was going to invite on an all expense paid trip just to attend. I just happened to be on that list.

Matthew Miller from ZD|Net and Michael Jerz from My-Symbian were nothing but names who I would often see in blue and underlined. I met Rafe from All About Symbian in Las Vegas during the 2007 CES, but our brief encounter lasted less than 15 minutes. After 3 whole days I can safely say that these men are no longer hyperlinks, but they are my friends.

Matthew is an American like myself who has lived on both sides on the coast. His love for mobile extends beyond S60, but he is committed to owning an E90 one of these days. He has a podcast called Mobile Tech Roundup where he talks about everything from cell phones all the way up to tablet pc’s.

Michael Jerz is from Poland and his love for mobile also extends past S60. I played with UIQ for the very first time on his Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) P990i. He owns a red Nokia E90 that is practically his third arm. His summit coverage isn’t up yet, but I bet it has something to do with the thousands, yes thousands, of pictures he took. He has been writing about communicators since the first one was introduced.

Rafe is from the UK and lives in the country side about an hour away from London. He wants to see Symbian remain the mobile leader regardless of whoever builds the UI on top. His website publishing days began back in University, similar to myself, when PSION owned all of Europe. We had fun bashing each others pronunciation of words, but I’ll always be envious that I don’t know how to speak proper (UK) English.

Darla Mack and Steve Litchfield were invited to the event, but couldn’t make it. I deeply regret not getting to spend a few days with you guys. Darla and I met at CES 2007 and spent a day together in New York for the Evening with S60 event. I have yet to meet Steve, but I’ve been watching his "Smartphones Show" podcast since starting Ring Nokia.

When I accepted Phil’s invitation to Spain I did it because I wanted to see Spain. Selfish I know, but I’m known for being an asshole so I may as well say it. What ended up happening was I got the opportunity to make friends with people who have the same fire in their hearts that I do when it comes to mobile phones. The location of the S60 summit quickly became irrelevant after the first hour of hanging out with my fellow writers.

Nokia really does live up to it’s ad slogan of connecting people and I want to take the time to thank them for it. Thank you to Phil for the invite and thank you to Matt, Rafe and Mike for the great couple of days in Madrid. Like the Roman’s, I’m going to take everything you have taught me and incorporate it into my writing style and point of view about the mobile industry I proudly consider myself a part of now.

I can not emphasize how awesome the event was and how sad I am that Steve and Darla couldn’t make it. Expect my coverage to go up sooner rather than later, I’m still recovering from the massive 9 hour shift in time zones.

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S60 Touch: Pulled at the last minute from the summit

Stefan Constantinescu — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 08:18:12 +0000

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) choose not to cover touch at the S60 summit. Reasons weren’t given, but I don’t really mind. I can understand that any company would rather wait to demo something that would amaze people rather than show off something that wasn’t ready.

I did manage to take a picture of this powerpoint slide however:

First bullet under "Smart Simplicity"

It exists.

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Phil’s S60 Summit Day 1 coverage is up

Stefan Constantinescu — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 05:35:46 +0000

This was the day before the actual summit; Nokia (NYSE: NOK) treated us to a party in the Spanish country side that was most enjoyable.

Check out Phil’s post over at See into S60, lots of pictures included.

Thanks for being my wingman Phil

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Voice of S60: Phil interviews me

Stefan Constantinescu — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 05:30:44 +0000

It has been less than 6 months since starting Ring Nokia (NYSE: NOK). I must have done something magical because I ended up being interviewed by Phil for episode 22 of the Voice of S60 podcast!

Let me know if you enjoyed our conversation.

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The plan of attack for the weekend

Stefan Constantinescu — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 05:24:32 +0000

Tomorrow is Friday, I took off work.

I’m throwing Windows XP SP2 back on my notebook and after that is done I want to blog all about the S60 Summit. Those posts will be stickied to the top, everything else (the news I missed during my stay in Spain) will be under it.

Eldar from Mobile-Review already has his coverage up on the net:

I had the honor of meeting Eldar during the S60 summit, we even had breakfast together. I hope I run into him again at another conference since I am disappointed we only conversed for about 3 hours. This man’s knowledge of everything mobile made me feel inadequate.

I only hope that one day I could reach that sort of Jedi status, now please excuse me while I go pass out after 12 hours of traveling.

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Tour of the hotel room and thank you Maria

Stefan Constantinescu — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 18:33:50 +0000

No one visited me even tho I posted my room number online. I did receive a ton of text messages however:

This key is awesome. The electricity to the hotel room doesn’t function unless the key card is placed into a slot by the front of the door:

This is the room. One bed, two chairs, one television, huge mess:

The (lack of) blogging has been happening from this desk:

You might be noticing that these images are not N95 or Canon Powershot A510 quality. What can they be? I’ll give you a hint:

It is my brand spanking new Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E61i given to me by Maria Kellokumpu, Nokia Enterprise Communications Manager. There is a story behind this gift, but I don’t have the video that explains it all:

I’m ridiculously happy. It would have been better if I didn’t drop it and scratched the back, but I’m not complaining.

Thank you very much Maria!

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Exclusive: Touch enabled S60 will be at the summit

Stefan Constantinescu — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:33:03 +0000

Just came back from a podcast with Phil from the Voice of S60.

I got a nice little piece of information for you: touch screen support for S60 will be talked about at the summit!

No information yet as to details, time lines, devices, etc. All I know is that I’m going to be hearing about it tomorrow.

Wicked!

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My trip thus far: Madrid Day 0

Stefan Constantinescu — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 08:20:32 +0000

Background Information: I began this post yesterday, then took a siesta and then went out all night. I’m probably going to offend some people with my liberal grammar usage of tenses.

Today was unlike any other day I’ve ever lived.

I never understood how it must have felt for my parents to come to America with little to no English skills, but today it became clear as crystal. I’m in Spain right now and have absolutely no clue what it going on around me. It can be frighting at times, but very rewarding when something as simple as successfully communicating a thought or concept to someone occurs after a few painstaking minutes.

Nothing I have looked at, heard, eaten or smelled today has come close to replicating past experiences in my life. Everything is new, everything is fresh.

Let me take a step back, how did I actually get here? This is the story only a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95 could tell:

I woke up early Sunday morning to a very typical breakfast. Three boiled eggs, a block of feta cheese and a few tomatoes. Some may think this is unhealthy, but my father (a retired doctor) has been ranting about how Americans don’t know what food is ever since stepping off the plane back in 1991:

Once that meal was finished we all climbed into my mother’s Honda and got going to the airport. After failing the security checkpoint twice due to my wallet, I am finally granted access into the terminal; third times the charm. The tectonic plates shifted before my very eyes and out emerged this evil demon:

How do I know it was the spawn of Satan? I gave into temptation and touched it.

5 seconds later American Airlines makes an announcement that my flight is delayed. Coincidence? I think not.

Half an hour after my flight was supposed to depart, we begin boarding. I ran to the gate:

The next 3 hours would prove to be a true test of my patience. I don’t like people who fidget and I was sitting next to a teenager who must’ve had 10 too many Red Bulls. Trying to sleep is also quite difficult when someone is playing their PSP on full blast, without headphones.

Oh well, I won’t let this ruin my trip! As soon as the plane lands I dash to the front so I could distance myself from shaky only to come across another strange figure. I didn’t ask this guy what the mask was for, I just kindly requested permission to take a picture:

At this point my stomach was beginning to emit noises that would demand the services of an exorcist, so I go to the nearest restaurant I could find at JFK airport. Sure it was expensive, $15 for a damn chicken caesar salad, but I got that that much needed dose of food my belly was aching for.

Here is the real deal. I’m going to be on this sucker for 8 hours:

Before boarding I took a seat in the British Airways lounge and plugged my N95 in. I would’ve sat down longer if I knew how many people were going to board this airplane:

The flight itself wasn’t difficult, keeping my eyes to myself was. I have a thing for Latin women and let’s just say that the flight was definitely spicy. I’ve never flown Iberia before, but if I’m ever going to be in Spain again I will only fly with them. The flight attendants went out of their way to make me happy, the food was amazing, the feature movie "Little Miss Sunshine" was available in 3 languages and the coffee was magically delicious. I arrived in Spain with a smile on my face … until I saw passport control:

Two hours later I get on another line for 30 minutes to get enough euros for my taxi ride. My driver was going over 180 km/h (over 110 mph) in his VW Passat and thus he got a very nice tip.

Checking into the hotel was quick and efficient and I was now a man on a mission:

Locate adapter for my American electronics
Find the nearest bank to exchange dollars to euros
Get my phone working

The front desk people rocked. They sold me an adapter, told me a currency exchange office was within the hotel, but they couldn’t help me find a prepaid SIM card. I didn’t let this upset me, I’m in Spain for crying out loud, it’s awesome!

I run back upstairs to grab my camera and on my way out the door I bump into Ganesh from the S60 Browser Team. I told him my issue and he was kind enough to let me use his E61i to call T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) and get international roaming enabled. Thank you very much, you have no idea how much I appreciate that.

Now I leave the hotel and take on the streets. Spain is an assault on the senses and I was too busy reaping the benefits of experiencing a new culture to take out my camera and snap photos. After failing to locate food so early in the morning (11:00) I resorted to making a quick pit stop at a butchers and getting the proper supplies to make myself a hearty sandwich. The pork here is epic. After 5 hours of aimlessly walking around Madrid the jetlag kicked in. At 15:00 yesterday I was dead asleep.

I woke up around 19:00 only to get a phone call moments later from Phil for an invite to hang out. How could I refuse?

What was supposed to be a quick trip to the super market turned into an evening of good old fashioned fun that ended around 02:30

We discovered a company named after him:

But best of all was the half liter of cold beer after all that walking:

I had a blast and instantly fell asleep the moment my head touched the pillow.

It is 09:00 in Spain right now and I just got of the shower. I’m starving.

There you have it: The story of how I got to Spain and how the first 24 hours went.

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