Outside a trendy workspace in London's Kings Cross on Thursday 21st April, a man in a fox costume ushers people greets people on their way to celebrate the launch of Firefox 4. Inside people are wearing party hats, enjoying decorated cupcakes and proudly wearing Mozilla T-Shirts in a good reminder to us all that open source software is something that we should both advocate and celebrate as a great opportunity. During the evening we get treated to some great presentations that show off what the latest version of Mozilla Firefox is capable of and also how HTML5 technology will redefine our expectations of what a web browser can do. However, there is much more to Mozilla than Firefox.
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Crossing the road towards the venue I was looking for I stopped at stared at the building in the distance. It was looking rather sorry for itself, broken windows, graffiti and a tired concrete look. Outside, a woman in a grey boiler suit directed me to the press/guest list queue. This rather odd venue is the “Old Sorting Office” in the heart of London and the location of Thursday's (March 31st) launch of Sony Ericsson’s much anticipated “Playstation phone” officially named the Xperia Play. Inside was a party venue that was a complete contrast to the outside of the building, a location inspired by computer games and the sights of the far east. It might have been a sorting office once, but for that day only it was the "Xperia Play Rooms". This was going to be an interesting evening.
The MiFi is a handy little device from 3 that allows you to have a pocket sized mobile broadband router that can connect to the mobile network to give you access to the Internet while you are out and about. Despite its convenience the unit did cause owners to have a few gripes, it had a status display that was tricky to understand, you could only reconfigure it with the supplied Windows client and its three button operation proved unpopular. Taking this feedback onboard 3 have been working with the unit's maker Huawei to bring out a new and improved version and I've just been to the event in London where the MiFi 2 (also known as the Huawei E585) was shown off to bloggers.
If I was to walk into a mobile phone shop and demand a full size skateboard controller for my mobile or an interface to control an Etch-A-Sketch I wonder what they would do? Maybe they would laugh or insist that no normal person would want to do that or claim it can't be done. Yet last Thursday night in an unassuming corner of the east end of London, UK, I found people who were experimenting with these ideas and more. The event was the Push N900 Showcase, organised by Nokia, and I was delighted to be invited along. I even had a go at a bit of live video broadcasting with my trial Nokia N900 while I was there.
Last night I attended the 3MobileBuzz New Year Meet Up in London. It was a great evening and was a chance to mix with people from 3 UK, 3MobileBuzz and also other bloggers and individuals interested in the mobile industry. The big surprise of the evening for me was being awarded the 3mbcreative prize! I did not expect to receive the prize and was really happy just to be nominated. Thank you to everybody on Twitter who voted for me. The picture on the right shows me trying to do an acceptance speech.