All photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.
Fri Nov. 9, 2007 – My plane arrived at Heathrow at 6:38am this morning. I did not really sleep at all on the plane nor eat after last evening’s lovely gluten-free plane meal. The Heathrow line for passport control was very long, but the agent I dealt with was very nice and easy going. Thanks, sir!
Just a little before 8am found me at Paddington Station and off to my hotel. Damian the fabulous desk clerk / manager was able to get me into a room by 10am, where upon I showered and meant to take a 2 hour nap before going to lunch and then to the Regent’s Street Apple Store to watch the big to do for the UK release of the iPhone. Six hours later I woke up for a deep sleep.
After much rushing, I arrived at the scene of the London iPhone geek queue by 5pm. I found Steve Marshall right off the bat standing about 20th in line, as he had tweeted his placement in the queue, and Dave Stone who was observing from the edge of the sidewalk. For the next hour, I hung out with Steve and Dave, as well as chatting with various mobile company folk who were friends of Dave’s. It was a blast. The security and cops were a little over organizing, as the crowd wasn’t overly large or obnoxious but instead was happy and excited. Free pizza and champagne was given out to folks in line by local merchants, lots and lots of UK press was out and about interviewing folk. All in all, darned good spectacle and fun.
After Steve and the rest of the line was let in the Apple Store to make their purchases, Dave and I went around the corner to the Liberty Bar to have a drink with Walid and Sokratis of TrustedPlaces as well as Paul Walsh. Dave and I had a lively conversation about mobile, our various punk youth experiences, running with the Trickster, and other bits, which melded into a lively conversation with Paul and Sokratis about the future of the web, the mobile web, and device adnostic web standards. Good fun. An excellent way to start out a trip to London.
From there I went off to find food, as the others had to go their ways. Now I am back at my hotel and am hoping to actually go to sleep before 1 am London time…