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Like Rudy, it took me a couple of days to recover from 3GSM and gather my thoughts. Pictures still fly by whenever I close my eyes about what I’ve seen and what I’ve done the last week. But that’s for another post. Apart of the adventures, this years 3GSM congress was the perfect opportunity to be a pure mobile Internet guy for a whole week. In practice, this meant not to touch the notebook for a week, leave it at the hotel, and do all my blogging, emailing, picture uploading, podcast downloading, web surfing, etc. from the mobile phone.

Well equipped with a Nokia N93 and a Bluetooth keyboard I kept uploading pictures to flickr and blog entries to my mobilesociety blog on a daily basis. Uploading pictures via 3G was out of the question due to still horrendous roaming prices. Fortunately, the N93 is also Wifi capable and Barcelona has a lot of open Wifi hotspots. So thanks to open hearted folks in Barcelona I uploaded pictures while coming or going to the congress. Also, Nokia had an open access point at their booth despite not even Nokia people themselves knew about it. Another convenient way to upload pictures over lunch. Thanks Nokia! Using Wifi hotspots was more of a necessity rather than comfort as it has one big disadvantage: You have to stay where you are while data is transfered due to the short range of the Wifi.

Sending and receiving my eMail and sending my blog entries on the other hand was much more comfortable as I used the 3G network for it. Anytime, anywhere, much better than the Wifi experience but also a bit more costly. A reprimand goes to Typepad, as they still haven’t fixed their blog upload via eMail service. Half the time my uploads were rejected and I had to try twice. Hey guys over at Typepad, is this really so difficult?

To stay up to date what is happening in the rest of the world during the week, I used the browser on the phone and mobile optimized versions of my favourite news pages (BBC, Tagesschau, Heise, Teltarif) over either Wifi if available or the 3G network. I also do this quite often at home while sitting on the couch, so I was already used to this part of my “mobile only week” experience.

I have to admit that especially for blogging I missed my notebook. I found that mo-blogging is still severely restrictive. In particular I wasn’t able to link to other pages, like my flickr page and other interesting info which is really a great disadvantage (hello Typepad…). Also, not having other web pages open simultaneously in different tabs restricts the ability to quote from other sources. Inserting pictures to be presented as thumbnails is also a pain. Thus, my blog entries of last week contained no links and no pictures. The links which are there today were inserted later.

All in all, I didn’t miss the notebook a lot, but quite frankly, I was still happy returning to the bigger screen and to use both the mobile and the notebook depending on the situation. Here are my humble wishes for next year to further improve my mobile experience: Lower 3G data roaming fees and an improved mo-blogging interface. Too modest?