CTIA: Day 2: The Nokia Booth and Photo Testing

CTIA: Nokia N8: The NFC Cup Game at the Nokia Booth CTIA: Nokia Astound / C7: Jeb and Brad at the hotel bar
Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8 and a Nokia C7.

Wed 03.23.11 – Today started with a breakfast meeting between the Nokia E7 enterprise team leaders and the bloggers, while not as lively as a discussion as yesterday morning, the enterprise guru – Todd Thayer – gave some good background on the considerations of creating a good mobile device for the enterprise customer.
After the breakfast meeting we went back over to the Convention Center for more of the Trade Show and keynotes, as well as participating in an Angry Birds high score challenge. I spent most of my day wandering around taking photos with the Nokia N8, C7 and E7 for a future photo comparison blog post. To give you a wee sneak peak, the E7 is an amazing and marvelous device with a great qwerty keyboard, a delicious tilted screen, but a sub-standard camera. The Nokia C7/Astound beat the E7 on every photo and occasionally took as good as the N8 photos.
I also spent a good hour or two at the CTIA Nokia booth in conversation with various folk, including the bright and talented Darin Burris. We covered a wide variety of subjects from mobile development, user experience design, how one goes from an artist/musician to a designer/developer, the Nokia+MicroSquash alliance, to the wonders of maltese dogs, as well as attempting to get a red circle on the Nokia Near Field Communication (NFC) cup game to no avail.
The folks at the Nokia booth had four stations of demo/display phones plus two NFC readers at each station that would read a NFC chip embedded on the bottom of coffee cups. Once one got a cup, one could go around to the stations and put the cup on the reader to see if one won, if the circle turned bright red and stayed red then one would win a Nokia N8. It was fun, interactive, and a great way to get CTIA attendees involved.
The evening hours were spent at the CTIA Unplugged event at the Hard Rock cafe which included a Lady Antebellum concert. Unfortunately, I did not feel very festive due to yesterday’s bad news and was not too peppy, but the company was good and I really had fun text with Erika on the Nokia E7’s qwerty keyboard. Love that keyboard, love it.
The evening ended with a nightcap at the hotel bar with our group and a few SXSW friends that walked by.