Well, not live anymore, but it was live yesterday.
You can see the action replay of me presenting yesterday here, along with a few other companies.

I’m in New York at the AlwaysOn Media CEO Showcase event. There are some rows of tables with power (somewhere) labelled “Blogger Bullpen”, and that’s where I’m sitting.

Most of the people around me are either reading e-mail, looking at the panelists’ websites, but not visibly blogging. On the other hand, the panelists haven’t really said anything worth blogging so far.

Various people have blogged on the LG Prada phone, which is due in Europe in February of this year. This slim, elegant black device has a touch screen with soft keypad. The UI is reputedly designed by Prada designers, and from the limited view on the demo it looks very nice indeed.

Not cluttered up with techy features, and not hung up with religious fanaticism, it is an easy to user phone, not a hybrid of other things that work better independently. And it’s small.

This is coming from the departure lounch at Johannesburg airport after a splendid week in the African sun.

Yebo is Zulu for yes, said with a “go for it” oomph, Yebo! South African operator Vodacom has adopted this word as their slogan, combining it in lots of ways, including the summer Christmas campaign, Yebo Feva, and featuring some very cool animated meerkats.

Their competitor MTN is trying to catch up using Yello! based on their corporate colour and hello. However it just doesn’t have the same impact.

But what is truely astounding is that these adverts are everywhere: plastered on buildings, hoardings, shops, airports, and quite a lot of things that move too. This country is just hot for mobile!

I posted some comments on the Visit Scotland Find It service for Hogmanay. I’ve just received an SMS asking for feedback on the service.

And how do I provide that feedback? On the web with a computer!

Duh! What a missed opportunity. Wouldn’t replying to that SMS have been so much better? I’ll bet hardly anybody will bother and the opportunity is lost. Sigh. This lack of joined-up thinking is endemic to the mobile industry. Double sigh.

Everyone from analysts to free papers have been covering the iPhone. My turn after a few days of cogitation.

Simply put, it’s not a phone. It’s a cool PDA.

Phones make awful PDAs and PDAs do not make great phones. I like the Sony Ericsson P990i form factor as it is a reasonable phone as well as a good screen. That big glass screen that will get horribly greasy off people’s ears. And how will that affect the touch screen?

Using fingers is cool, I do it all the time on the P990i, but miss quite a lot of the time as the items aren’t quite big enough. So how can you make a keyboard on it? Number pad, sure, but will an alpha keypad work well enough?
And the idea that this is the same OSX as we use on our Macs is unfounded - it’s just some of the layers with a new UI on it. And you can’t download extra applications, apparently. And if it is as reliable as the MacBook version I have, well, the stability will be about on a par with other mobiles.

Conclusion: lots of hype, nothing market rocking.

Happy New Year, everyone!