Today Doug and I hit the floor in earnest, touring the big booths: Samsung Mobile, LG, and Sony Ericsson, and also catching an AT&T media luncheon where CEO Ralph de la Vega basically confirmed that a 3G iPhone will be hitting his stores' shelves in the next few months. We sat in funny music pod chairs (every show seems to have a different company with music pod chairs), ate some good bbq, and ... of course ... saw lots and lots of phones.
We've posted eight videos from the show so far and have another ton of footage to go through, edit, and post (seriously, I've got at least 9 gigs of raw footage on my laptop right now from the past two days alone). So we're gonna break for dinner, hit the Guitar Hero Mobile launch party at House of Blues, and then get back to editing, posting, blogging, and of course, returning to the Convention Center for the show's final day.
A few thoughts on today aside from the iPhone news:
- Sprint and Samsung won Best In Show for their new Instinct handset
- YouTube commenters are already arguing about whether Instinct is "Just like an iPhone but on Sprint" or "Not as cool as a real iPhone"
- The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 promises to do just about everything, and oozes luxury. It'll cost a pretty penny when it launches in a few months.
- I was impressed with LG's new handsets, the AT&T Vu and Verizon enV(2) in particular. evV(2) is much sleeker and nicer in hand (and pocket) than the original, and will debut at a reasonable $129 price point.
- Most of the phones I really want aren't destined for US markets. LG's Viewty, SE's C902, and Nokia's N82 come to mind. Granted, they all can be used on US GSM networks, but they're limited to EDGE or GPRS data - no 3G on these beauties. Viewty's camera and touch screen are amazing, C902 packs a 5MP camera into an incredibly slim form factor, and the N82 is an imaging powerhouse. There's a trend here: Cell phones are on the verge of replacing consumer-level digital cameras. At least outside of the US.
- Free Gelato is good. Thanks, Yahoo!
More from the show tomorrow, and more video just as soon as we can upload it.
