My first post on the road, from the keyboard of the Compal MID device. I’m currently at the top of Carlton Calton Hill in Edinburgh, a site that holds a lot of Scottish history; from the cairn to remind us of the recent fight for a Scottish Parliament, to the old Royal Observatory and the old prison.

It’s also the site for Beltane Fire Festival and the Torchlight Procession. If you think of fire in Edinburgh, then this is one of the locations to come to.

The Compal was used today in two areas. The first was navigation on a bicycle. even though I have no mounting bracket on the handlebars, the Compal sat happily in my inside pocket, within easy reach for me to stop and check directions on Google Maps. I did have to use the HTML only web version though to get an acceptable speed, but it got me here – although not on the route I would have went – it seemed to delight in taking me up the steepest hills.

I could also have used it to pull in information, primarily from Wikipedia, about the buildings, monuments and history of the hill – and while that’s like asking an American to look up the Oath of Office so they don’t get it wrong (ahem), if I was somewhere else (say a Florida Theme Park or The Alamo) having an independent tour guide online, on a large and easy to read screen would probably be just as good as a guide book; if not better as I could explore information and links myself.

How is it that we feel instantly connected with some devices and really not with others? Today I ‘upgraded’ from my Compal / Aigo device with Linux to something running Windows. Being a die hard windows person who can work her way around Linux (I don’t do cake but I baked myself some kernels …) but does not really want to,  I convinced Steve that is really is a great idea to swap devices. As in “I want that other one!”.

It was nice getting to know you but the other one is sexier …

The gadget session at MBC09 today had more than one person who was happy that “no crappy windows” was running on the machines, while I am the opposite. Give me that familiar loved interface! And if it happens to be on a shiny new OQO 2 that is fine with me as well.

Meaning:  if there had been a windows on the compal / aigo, that would have been a totally different game for me. Though I sound subjective, I did test the little one with the flaw during the short time I had it and will provide more insight why I think we did not bond (and why this is relevant). Now let’s see how the new gadget behaves over the next days so I really can get going with some crazy stuff as everybody else once I am back from my travel thursday!

I am also using this time to familiarize myself with the device and like to see how I can use it in a typical mobile situation for me: being on a conference / event, wanting to tweet around and maybe something more. I’ll keep you posted!

People following me on twitter saw me trying to get my hands on the MID devices, but it was a bumby ride – let’s just say that transport by seaturtles across the atlantic might have been faster. Nonetheless I got my toys in time for my trip to the Microblogging conference in Hamburg this weekend.

You probably saw Steve mention this conference before and might ask yourselve why this was so interesting to Midmoves. Well take a look at this:

Twitter- and Microblogging fans are the kind of people who really are into more than just “one desktop pc and or a laptop for work” – they are interested in real gadgets for mobile microblogging! Friday Steve and I already could show some of our gadgets and people would stop and talk to us, to find out what these shiny gadgets where.

The idea to do a “show off your gadgets and I’ll show you mine” session at the barcampy part of the conference was something we had tinkered with as an idea before, but the reactions on friday where so encouraging the we called – and they came. Btw – does ‘I’ll show you mine’ cover the plural form as most of us had more than one device?

I did not expect this result and quite frankly I personally would have been satisfied to just be able to test some gadgets myself. But I had to share the gadgets. With a lot of aahs and oohs about 20 people where putting their gadgets on the table, trying to get not only a look at the orhter ones not belonging to them, but also hold them in their hands and try them out. The picture above and below shows a collection of the gadgets in play: as you can see not only MID gadgets but given Steve’s collection quite a lot of these where his.

Untergeek has a list in German of all identifyable devices, between others we had:

• Lenovo ideapad S10
• Medion Akoya E1210 (MSI Wind)
• Asus EEE PC
• Nokia E51 with external keyboard
• Wiibrain I1
• the ‘man purse’ from Kojinsha
• Linux-Phone Openmoko Freerunner,
• SonyEricsson M600i
• Compac / Aigo
• OQO 2plus
• T-G1 (”Android-” /  GooglePhone)
• XDA Orbit (HTC)
• in der Mitte ein Nokia N95
• BlackBerry 8310
• several iphones

Not in the pictures are all the devices with which we took pictures. As we where typing on the small keyboards, one was asking if somebody had the new Vaio with them – and Steve had the solution: a paper copy of the keyboard in original size.

Over the day (it was the at the first timeslot of the event) people would come to ask questions and if they could see those gadgets most of them because they had missed the fun. There where some great conversations sharing what works (or not) and why, why one prefers a special system or type of gadget and so on.

Big props to Steve again, I think people really enjoyed his deep knowledge of the different devices and that they where able to have a look at his collection.

Now, when can we have something similar and where can I put in my requests for additional devices to show of?

See below for some more impressions of the “mbc09meetsmidmoves“:

Evan Prodromou (@evan) from identica trying out a Mid Device (he also had a good insight into mobile and was geeking out with Steve right from the start)

Travel luggage of a mobile digital native – live streaming to qik included!

Some devices, live TV and the now famous ‘have a look at the Vaio keyboard size – it is huge!’

I hope the pictures show a bit how much fun we all had!

[if you have more pictures and links to some of the videos, please leave them in the comments or ping me directly!]

In a few hours, the MID Moves project officially gets into gear. Jenn is already on her way to California where she’ll be getting the ball rolling with her OQO 2+, Benq S6 and Willcom D4. Then, on Tuesday, i’ll be feeding in along with Nicole and Ewan.

As a little side project I’d thought I would close down not only my home PC and netbook but also my broadband Internet connection. Using the XP-based MIDs (some confusion there I know – Intel tends to put UMPCs under the MID banner) I don’t think there will be a problem at all. If that 1.86Ghz OQO 2+ turns up (fingers crossed for tomorrow) then I’ve got that wonderful docking station to use. I’ll just connect to a monitor, drop a 3G card in and use the device as my desktop for a week. I really don’t expect to report any issues at all with this set up although I’m sure I’ll notice the drop from the 32mb/s on my broadband down to around 1mb/s that I get here at home!

I’ll be testing in Germany on T-Mobile’s day flat service (on a contract) the same on a pre-paid T-Mobile card, day-flat ‘Web Session’ on a Vodafone pre-pay, Vodafone on a 200MB per month contract and the 2.50-per-day ‘flat’ service from Fonic.

Stay tuned here and on MID Moves for updates during the week. Feel free to ask questions too.

About 8 months ago I had an idea for a promotional project. I called it the ‘MID Summer Tour’ and pitched it to Intel. They were very interested but unfortunately, my timing was terrible. I should have known that projects like this can take an extremely long time to set up so instead of a summer tour, we’ve re-worked the idea and have come up with the MIDMoves project. A mobile Internet device project, website and tour that will take place during Jan 09. We’re going mo-blogging crazy with Intel MIDs!

Over the next 4-weeks, 4 people will be preparing themselves for a 4-day tour with Intel’s MIDs. We’re going to prepare by talking about the latest location-aware services, look at how we can integrate services like Friendfeed, Twitter, Flickr, how we plan to stay connected using 3G and WiFi services and how we will communicate back to the website. Then, soon after CES, we’ll have 8 Intel-based Mobile Internet Devices distributed across the team and starting on the 19th Jan we go mobile! We’ll be leaving our comfy offices and getting ‘out there’ to test the devices, the scenarios, the mobile communications software and the public. We’ll be creating a near-live, media-rich, mobile-communications road-tour right on the MIDMoves website.

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