Here is the video:

Archie was about to go for his bath so I thought I’d call and say hello. I put on my headset and called my wife.

She answered and I spent about 5 minutes having a chat with her and making faces at Archie which he found hilarious.

I was standing in the corner by the place where people were embarking on to the platform and out of the corner of my eye, I was staggered by the amount of people who walked by openly staring.

I want to be clear — I wasn’t doing a Lord Flashheart, standing legs astride, codpiece out to the world, in the middle of the Eurostar terminal, shouting at the iPhone. I was standing in a corner, deliberately out of the way.

I think the fact I was holding up the iPhone to my face certainly looked strange. That attracted the first glance. And when people saw I was in the middle of a video call, that got the second, third or continual glance. Some folk were astounded.

Some people were actually craning their necks.

And some of them were carrying iPhones! FaceTime shouldn’t be a surprise to them…

It moved me to record a SocialCam video just after the call:

So when I got my connection back some time late last week, I was mildly hoping to see something massively interesting to inspire me to write about; some major piece of news – I mean it’s nearly Christmas after all – or just something that might catch my eye.

Now even on my trawl across the internet in search of mobile news, and the latest goings-on in this brilliant segment of society and business I was expecting something.

Did I?
No.

Am I happy?
No.

You see, even I, a relatively technological “young” person/student, who has a keen interest in the world around me, and with Christmas looming just around the corner, just something eh?

Well, apparently not.

Now maybe some good news, and/or surprises are waiting around the corner for the New Year; or maybe something spectacular will happen in the after-Christmas sales. Needless to say though, I was expecting some major news about something; a big price cut, or some other form of attempt to gain more consumer interest in this very dismal financial situation.

I know I’ve said numerous times now about the lack of real spark at the moment, and the generally poor attempts at gaining custom; and although nothing major, I’m quite amazed at how little I’ve read about anything enticing me – as a probable and likely customer – to go and spend money.

Maybe I’m wrong in my presumptions that the mobile market is avoiding the “Credit Crunch” and that when I walked down my high street the other day, Phones4U, CPW, O2, Three, and the numerous other shops which hoard the high street were meant to be relatively empty on a busy Thursday leading up to Christmas?

Hmm…

Well, I’ll try not to be so pessimistic, and I will believe that someone somewhere is planning something out to ensure that the mobile industry remains in-tact.

Android is good for the industry if it can help offer a broad, open, standard, platform on which people can build stable, consistent user experiences. However one challenge is that it has fragmented an already fragmented J2ME environment by creating yet another non-standard implementation.

The fragmentation of Java means that developers might start looking elsewhere for mobile tools unless there is some consolidation; and Apple is doing a pretty good job of making applications easy to write at the moment.

One thing that Android’s launch does do is it drags mobile operating systems into the consumer psyche and handset purchase decisions even more. This results in the continual evolution of the mobile community and ultimately how people interact with each other, and how brands will interact with consumers.”

I think the dragging of mobile operating systems into the consumer psyche can only be a good thing. Nice points Alex — thanks!