The AAS team are out and about at the Symbian Expo. Direct from the floor here are Steve Litchfield, Paul Gibson and Jody Armstrong talking about the Expo are some of the early things to catch their eye.

Live from Symbian Expo:
(PG) Walking into the Symbian Expo after collecting the pass at the front desk, the Symbian Expo already had a buzz of activity. The Expo Hall is massive with over 100 exhibitors in attendance. This includes operators, vendors, developers and websites and most are familiar names in the Symbian world.

At the All About Symbian stand, when I arrived, the finishing touches were being added and then the fun started trying to connect to the internet via the wireless lan available at the ExCel Centre.
Within the first hour there were some familiar faces coming to speak to us including a few from our Pub Meet last night.

As this is being written there is a speech from the CEO of Sony Ericsson, Miles Flint. The speech is about Symbian from the perspective of Sony Ericsson. Now there's Vodafone's head guy and bullet point slides galore, followed by someone from Carphone Warehouse.

(SL) To be honest, most people are tuning out of the speeches to some degree and getting on with the business of meeting people, pressing the flesh, and so on. After you've seen one bullet titled 'amplify and analyse converged business opportunities in the mobile data ecosphere', you've seen them all...
Luckily, we've discovered that we can get free refreshments upstairs, with AAS qualifying as 'press', so our hardworking staff can retire every now and then!

The buzz is still quite impressive all round the ExCel, with the free entrance to all bringing in many hundreds, even thousands of people all really interested in what's being talked about. Considering that this is primarily about developers and the mechanics of making smartphones, it's all pretty cool.

(JA)
Bitboys 3D Hardware Acceleration
From a gaming point of view Bitboys had the top crown with their display of their 3D Hardware graphics accelerator chips. A couple of full screen rolling demos were on offer showing the capabilities of the engine and it was very impressive. Images were crisp, smoothed and zipped along at an incredible frame rate. One could only guess at the possibilities of an N-Gage style of device with this chip powering it.

Expect to see it in phones around 2007.

http://www.bitboys.com for more information


Digital Red Mobile Software
Digital Red Mobile Software were on hand to let the rabid gamer try out their new titles. I gave Requiem From Hell a try, a very diabloesque game featuring some pretty impressive isometric graphics. We'll be hearing more from Digital Red in the near future on AAS.

HP
HP were demoing their Photosmart 375 portable photo printer. A compact device that resembles a toaster this device incorporates a multicard reader, colour lcd screen and wireless connectivity via bluetooth. With the provided UIQ or Series 60 application a variety of content, not just photos, can be tagged and printed. Multiple images can be printed on the same page to same media or for presentations.