Take ten minutes, get yourself a coffee and sit and watch Peter’s walk-through demonstration. To begin with, expect to think ‘oh, that’s neat’. Toward the end, I hope you’ll start to think ‘ahhhh, now this is rather smart’.

And remember, everything you’re seeing is being done via a GPRS connection. We tried filming this whole thing three times outside at the Mobile World Congress and each time Peter’s 5800 Nokia kept on dropping wifi signal. So we reverted back to GRPS.

And it still works phenomenally well.

Here’s the video:

Here’s the video:

There was a private press pre briefing today in London all under embargo that we weren’t invited to, but we’re hearing good things are afoot.

We’d like to bring you more details, but there just aren’t any to offer – sorry.

Stay tuned and we’ll bring you any ground breaking news that arrives.

Who knows what it could be; it might even be the 16GB Samsung Omnia we’re all hearing news of *cough*

Or even the 12megapixel camera phone they’re bringing out *cough* *cough*

A “credible source” tells WebOS Arena, that Best Buy would be hosting a 60 days exclusive deal for retailing the Palm Pre. The Pre, which will be launched on Sprint’s network in the US would be the second phone to be available exclusively at Best Buy, following the Samsung Instinct which was touted to be highly anticipated and better than the iPhone.

Of course, as it is with the tons of rumors floating out there, there’s a huge cloud of uncertainty surrounding this one too.

[Via PhoneArena]

A chap in an overcoat was standing by the car’s open door and as I pulled up, he walked over to me and passed an unmarked padded envelope in through my opened window.

“Your instructions for the visit,” he said, before turning smartly away.

Within seconds the car was gone and I was alone.

I ripped open the envelope as my pulse rate quickened. Inside there was a single A4 sheet.

From the like of my N95, I saw the page was completely blank except for this:

0870 521 3232. 8am. 19-11-08. 112345-998407.

So, I’m going to phone that number tomorrow (Wednesday) at precisely 8am to get my next set of instructions.

If there’s phone signal, I’ll try and update you via Ping.fm, provided they don’t take my Blackberry off me when I arrive.

Dan Lane and Ben Smith were on the scene with me behind the camera to capture the joy.

Our joy tripled when we noticed Del Boy — replete with his rather old brick of a mobile. I kid ye not…. !

The Touch HD comes with a 3.8 inch, high resolution, widescreen WVGA touchscreen and a 5 megapixel auto focus camera. The device also comes with HTC’s TouchFLO 3D user interface and is fitted with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack.

Orange UK will be launching this in November and it will be priced at £79.99 on an 18-month contracts at £40 per month.

The quote I love is below;

Orange UK director of devices Francois Mahieu said: “It is a great phone but also a wonderful multimedia handset which paves the way to even more innovations from Orange next year in the mobile internet space.”

This is coming from a company that offers data for £8 a month which has a FUP of 30mb!

You gotta love Orange for their irony!

- – - – -

So I now want to talk about the TechCrunch event at August Capital last Friday. Before the meetup, there was a panel on the “Mobile Browsing Web Wars”. If you want to know about this read this post.

But I can sum it up for you in one sentence: A bunch of dudes, one woman, all talking about why their business model is the best. But I’ve got more important things to talk about: the schmooze-fest that followed, and as promised, an exclusive look at the new Loopt beta for you SMS Text News readers.

So the party was, as Ewan might say “fooking brilliant”. It really was. Beyond A-List attendees, free liquor, and these really cool cheeseburger sliders.

Loopt had a booth up and an influential blogger (not trying to be coy here, just don’t want them to deduct my identity) told me to go to the Loopt table and get the new beta. So I went to the table and dropped the blogger’s name and the Loopt gentleman tried to talk me out of it.
“It doesn’t work too well, it’s really buggy, are you sure?”

After convincing him that I wanted to take the plunge, he plugged in my iPhone to his computer and waited. And waited. After a few long minutes, it was ready, and now a new Loopt app with a small “TC” logo on it appeared on my home page.

At this point I see that they went out of their way to make this a special version just for the TechCrunch event, so I don’t know how many things they gave away. But I know that there was no line up to the table and each loading of the app took a long time, so I deduce that very few actually got it. And I haven’t seen anything about this new beta on the blogosphere yet, so maybe they made everyone sign an NDA or something?

But they didn’t make me, or even tell me verbally to keep this secret, so here goes!

The new feature allows users to connect and look at people in their area who aren’t their friends.

Before, you could only see where your friends are, but now you can see when you are at a bar, or party or whatever, live Loopt users.

Like everything else about Loopt, kinda cool, kinda creepy. OK very creepy. Especially with Loopt’s past issues about spamming users friends while trolling for invites.

Despite CEO Sam Altman’s apology and insistence that it would never happen again, it should of never happened in the first place. If I’m giving these guys my phone number, my location and my friend’s phone numbers, I don’t want to know what their next fuck-up will be.

See the screenshots to look at the new feature, which Loopt is calling ‘Mix”: