Spinvox 3

William may have beat me to it, but I’m still going to post about SpinVox. I think his photo just didn’t capture the enormity of their menacing army of box-headed action men…

Also, I just want to brag about the fact that I got a full-size manniquin and not just a puny keyring. Mwuharharharrr!

I wonder if Symbian should build an army of figurines with our OS cube as heads. Hmmm….

Zyb man

You forgot to mention zybman James!

Zyb

While exploring the vast maze of halls and stands that is 3GSM… sorry… I mean the Mobile World Congress, a colleague and I stumbled across this little gem: Zyb.

They started off as an address book and calendar back-up service. Using a phone that supports SyncML you can back up and restore to and from their servers. You can also choose to let other Zyb users who are in your address book link to your contact data so if you change something it shows up at their end automagically.

They are now expanding this into a hub for all your online, social networking activities. It can aggregate your activities from services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. and share them as a feed with your friends. The plan is to bring this functionality to your phone too in the form of a Java app.

It also ties in with online services like Google maps. They showed us a neat demo where you can plan a meal out with a friend. First you choose the friend from your address book. Then it shows a map of where that friend lives and find nearby restaurants. You choose the one you want and it notifies the friend and saves the address and phone number of the restaurant into your address book which can then be sync’d back to your phone. Pretty cool.

Myscreen

Subscriber based advertising service which pays you to download ads. Every time you open and close a call it pops up the ad and you get a nickel charged to an ewallet. You can then either use the cash electrically, or with a dedicated debit card. Invite a friend and you get more money.

Advertising on mobile is the work of the daevil, but i suppose if you are fulish enough to opt in to this, it’ll be worth it if you make some nawtee bunce while watching car ads.You can of course opt out any time, but will you? (cue diabolical laughter)

Clic2c

I got chatting to two gentlemen from auqaMobile who had come by the Symbian stand to watch our demos. They have a clever product called Clic2c which can embed URLs into images by adding a bit of noise. Then there is an app which runs on your phone (they demo’d this on a Nokia N73 so they obviously have an S60 app) which uses the phone’s camera to snap these images, extract the URL and open it in the browser. I was impressed how quickly this worked on their N73.

This is similar to 2D barcodes and their numerous variations but seems to be more elegant since the data can be directly embedded into photos and other images.

Jumpit

One off phone charger that gives you 60 minutes talk time. They come in various different flavors of device and cost £4.99. They are looking for distributors. They don’t appear to be terribly bio-degradable and probably have a half life of 3000 years, but for 60 mins of extra talk time, who cares about the planet!

Indecent proposal

Silver screen legend, bobby redford presses the flesh on the mofilm stand. He’s pushing film on phones for sundance and opened the keynotes as far as i recall. What not to shout out ‘ i loved you in the color of money!’

Spinvox 2

Those missing out on the dolls can still get these cute phone danglies, almost better than the real thing, almost.

Spinvox

The spinvox army of marching manniquins, trumpet their voice packaging app to infinity, tho perhaps not beyond. This walking wall is a brilliant way of getting your voice messaging message across and their inflatible packaged dolls will definitely become the stand freebie must-have of the show. (even if they do look suspiciously like someone has performed hideous surgery on a million Dr. Who dolls).

Panasonic toughbook exec

This is the executive version of the old toughbook, which could endure an attack from a small range tactical nuke, but looked like a churchill tank.

The 7 range lives up to its new executive name, with smoother lines and less meat on its haunches. The model i saw features an extremely handy integrated UMTS/HSDPA module allowing you to just slip in your sim, rather than plugging in a cumbersome and flakey 3g modem card. Judging by the promotional material, it also allows you to walk up walls, but don’t quote me on that.