Recap of What Was My MWC 2008 Experience

As one of my friends said recently, there are places were a person would go, and if they don't like it they won't visit that place anymore. If a person would find a place that he/she would like, then they can come back to it later and explore it again. Barcelona IS definitely the place one should go back again and explore. Of course going there in the first place on my end was made possible by the members of the WOMWorld team and especially Donna S. who graciously invited 8 bloggers and I to attend Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and had arranged our stay at a spectacular hotel called Le Meridien Ra Hotel & Spa in the quiet and beautiful outskirts of Barcelona, away from the daily commotion.

As I arrived there on Sunday, the eve of the conference, I unpacked and got my equipment ready for the next day. That night I got to attach faces to some of the people whom I've been reading their work for a while, and got to know completely new people. After taping the predictions show (which you can see here), we called it a night. The morning of the following day we headed towards the conference in a coach (or touring bus). After Frank G. of WOMWorld got our badges, we headed towards the Nokia booth in Hall 8 for the announcements of the four S60 devices. After a few minutes, as the Nokia Campaign Managers had scheduled for us, we interviewed product managers from the N96, N78, Ovi, Maps 2.0, and N-gage (this one next day). Unfortunately, the Wi-Fi connection at the Nokia booth and everywhere else on the conference floor was pretty much useless, so only bloggers who had cellular data or Ethernet cable connection were able to put out the news as it happened. Fortunately for the rest of the world trying to watch the Nokia Nseries Virtual Event online, Robbie D. of WOMWorld had a stable connection to keep the audience updated. Also that day some of the bloggers and I were able to finally purchase local Yoigo 3G SIM cards to try to bypass the Wi-Fi problems, but the service was extremely flaky that day, but got much more stable the next day.