So I’m here in Barcelona for the next 48 hours and I was lucky enough to attend the 14th Nokia World event. Less than an hour ago Nokia released it’s N97, probably, from the looks and specs of it, the most powerful device in the world. I’m actually blogging this from my N95 and it’s actually making me feel a bit inferior. Nevertheless, I, along with 2,000 other people from around the world, was shown the future of communications and I could not help but blog the moment as soon as humanly possible.

In any case, I’ve got videos, pictures and all that jazz, but I’m so entranced by all the geeky-techie stuff they’re allowing us to play with (oh, and Barcelona) that updates won’t be all too consistent.

But do come back for a visit soon.

In the meantime, I’m going to go run around this place like a kid in a candy store.

p.s. check out gizmodo and engadget

12:33pm (Barcelona Time): Playing around with the Nokia 97. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let anyone touch the ones that were actually working. I’ll upload a video of a live demo later. From what I’ve seen this thing is absolutely cool. Like the 95 in my pocket it has a 5mb camera with the Carl Zeiss lens, and then some. All touch. A virtual and actual qwerty for that human touch. Big screen. Very light weight (much more so than the iPhone). Best of all, it tilts 35 degrees as easily as a normal flip phone. Very cool. The official video is up on YouTube as of 30 minutes ago, so check that out if you’re interested.

1:05pm: As promised, here’s a live demo. Sorry for the video and/or sound quality, there was a mob surrounding this poor girl. Also, again, this is all filmed on my phone.

2:02pm: Well after a few hours of playing around in the so-called “Experience Lounge” I’ve finally got a chance to sit down and do some blogging (i.e. charge my laptop’s battery). The lounge is kind of like a hi-tech playroom for adults. That’s the best way to describe it really. It’s divided in to a bunch of corners that cover just about everything Nokia does. From maps to the new point-and-find system to a hybrid car that’s nokia enabled, to all the different phones and devices coming out in the next year.

Here’s the coolness:

The new Nokia N97 is pretty much the ultimate iPhone killer. Some interesting features I found was the So-Lo (social location) application. This basically allows the N97 to “know” where it is with GPS and, using your various social networks, it can add some of your favorite people on there. So imagine a map of Amman with pictures of your friends floating around in different places. Every time they (or you) update your status, you can see that floating head reflecting the new status. You know where everyone is and what they’re doing, to say nothing of sharing videos and photos instantly. This really gives a new meaning to social networking.

The N97 also stores up to 48GB of storage. Nuff said.

Nokia Maps and Point-and-Find: two really cool things. The point-and-find is something I got to see at Nokia’s event in October at the Dead Sea. It basically allows you to point at something with your phone, identify it, and then connect the Internet to get information about it. So, essentially, if you see a movie poster, you can point to it, and find out where the movie is playing, the show times, book a ticket, watch the trailer, etc. The same can be done with just about any object as long as it’s tagged. People can do the tagging themselves and in essence define the world around them. It all gets loaded in to a mainstream system, so Nokia, and its users, are tagging the world literally. I can imagine going around Amman tagging all the obscure little places.

Nokia Maps are doing a few cool things like allowing you to get real time information such as the traffic ahead of you, event guides. It’ll even allow you to avoid speed cameras and plan trips or routes. You can even use it as a pedestrian, where it maps out places to walk and leads you on your journey. In case the place you’re in is a bit urban and there’s noise all around you, beeps and vibrations will ring out to tell you to make a turn. That’s something I could use right about now. Oh, and this is all in the typical 2D representation as well as 3D.

Anyways. I’ll be back to share a few more experiences in a bit. I require some caffeine.

3:10pm: One neat thing about Nokia is the way it presents information. It’s interactive and hands-on, and some times even creative and innovative. At one corner of the experience lounge was a setup by the Nokia Siemens network and the way they chose to present their demos was by having this room with a big sphere that hosted a bunch of pucks with different categories. You pick up the puck, point it on the wall and a circle of information, videos, pictures, and tid-bits shows up. You twist the puck to browse through all the data, move it closer to zoom in. When someone nears you picks up their own puck, the two become connected data-wise. Pretty neat.

Another display had Nokia Music hosting a bit of a trivia show where three contestents would compete by having their music knowledge tested. In the N-games arena, flat screen TVs connected to Nokia devices allowed people to test out some of the latest games. In the corner of the room was a hybrid car that was Nokia enabled.

Littered throughout the hall, and perhaps going unnoticed by most of the people in the room, were these flat screen TVs that had a map of that very hall. But if you go a bit closer you discover it also shows a bunch of Nokia people who are currently moving around the same hall and updating their status while giving their demos to their crowds. It’s a cool way of demonstrating the Nokia So-Lo feature in real time.

All in all, I’m really interested in what is being done with information these days. On the Internet, social networks like Facebook are really developing and finding new ways to evolve. It all feels like undirected research, no one knows where it will go and eventually something new and creative and unprecedented comes out of it. The same can be said here, and the way information is presented.

Someday, power point presentations will be a thing of the past.

Pray.

3:27pm: The people from Engadget are around here somewhere…

3:36pm: A live Point-and-Find demo…