Fri 26/10/2007 17:29 26102007120
As good as the free beer and nibbles were, I was keen to move on to the next party... The Nokia s60 party. And so after the queue for a half an hour coach we were finally able to get a cab to Nokia's more civilised choice of party venue, in Smith's of Smithfield, my old stomping ground, and time to ditch the beer and nibbles for large glasses of red and canapés. The mood here was very different, there was a quiet, understated enthusiasm that you normally only see in a well funded, well run startup that knows they are on to something... And they are. Most of us started our smartphone life with a p800, could not wait to get the next version and the s60 and s90 smartphones could never quite tear us away from our uiq touch screens. Part of this was actually down to the devices- a nokia 6600 or even n70 could never compete with a true smartphone. However, we waited so long for the bitter disappointment that was the p990, and many were so impressed by the flawed genius of the nokia n80, that the n95 could do nothing but take the smartphone crown, and in doing so, take s60 with it. This is all building up to the fact that the star of this year's show, the phone that staff had to prize out of people's hands at the end of the day when closing their stand (really!) was the n95's better looking sister, the n95 8gb. Nokia can now breathe a sigh of relief; not because they finally have the best smartphone and operating system, but because it is the first year of this event that finally nobody asked Nokia "when are you bringing out a touchscreen smartphone".
