Meeting Simon Ainslie of Nokia UK

After a busy day at the Symbian Smartphone Show we dashed across London to the Nokia Comes With Music launch party.

(In fact I almost bought one of their handsets today when I was passing a Carphone Warehouse on the way to Earls Court).

There was a predictable riot of good looking young things queuing round the building when we poured out our cab and made our way to the crowded door.

Dizzy Rascal was, reportedly, inside already.

“Who?” asked Dan.

Ben wasn’t quite clear either.

Despite being in our collective early 30s, we, er… we’re old already. I had to look the chap up on Wikipedia. And then I found his name is spelt ‘Dizzee Rascal’. And his real name is Dylan. Think rapper, think DJ, think actor.

Lots of other ‘celebs’ were in attendance although, again, we — er — failed dismally in our attempts to identify them (“Is he from Holby City?” Is that the one off X-Factor?”).

Either way, Nokia pulled out the stops and presented a brilliant evening.

We did the sensible thing and filmed in the event reception. Initially we were hoping to chat to some PR and marketing chaps from Nokia about their Comes With Music strategy, but they did us one better.

Simon Ainslie was briefly available and popped up to have a chat on camera.

Dan and James couldn’t quite believe it. Ben was agog.

Why?

Because he knew his stuff.

We started off with some innocuous ‘what’s this all about then’ questions and Simon knocked out the answers without blinking.

As I held the camera I could see Dan and James thinking, “This isn’t one of those normal know-nothing executives that we normally chat to.”

Indeed we often spend a lot of our time trying to lead-the-witness on camera (‘this looks like a GOOD phone?’) because a lot of executives in this industry are 100% hopeless.

Not Simon.

We did two interviews. Once we established he could take the heat of a full Dan Lane examination, we got stuck in for a good few minutes, with Dan finally asking, ‘So, do you come with music?’

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they choose to handle that question. I think that’s why Dan posed the question. We wanted to see if he was real. Suffice to say he’s a top chap. You can see Simon’s interview most probably in the upcoming MIR Show on Monday. (I say most probably as we’ve got a heck of a lot of footage so we might need to stretch across two weeks for everything from today).

Thanks for taking the time Simon and every success with the Comes With Music launch.

You can, by the way, read about Simon in a recent Times of London profile piece. We’ll obviously need to get him on to the Mobile Industry Review Who’s Who in short order.