In today’s Part One, we talk about the technology we’ve brought, we visit some landmarks and spot-the-handset, we try making a video call to James back in London and we discuss the merits of cameras on handsets.

Here’s the video:

Part Two is coming soon!

But it’s far from a dead-loss… the real value of these events is the unplanned meetings.  Like Andrea, the Italian industry analyst, we met this morning whilst marching around Barcelona’s marina event in search of a Nokia event.  Fresh back from Rome, I still couldn’t understand why there was so muh talk of mobile TV (DVB-H) from Italy, but little evidence of any real usage.  Andrea assured us we should believe our eyes – Vodafone and TIM were leaving their mobile TV offering to go stale… un-marketed and un-loved.  Three, although more actively pushing the service (as we witnessed in their stores) was struggling financially.  The official subscriber numbers, he said, were misleading – they represent customers receiving free access to mobile TV services as part of a subscription, not a source of additional revenue for the operators.

And so, in 5 minutes, more useful information than all of the heavily scripted and stage-managed Microsoft event that followed… Perhaps we should scrap all our briefings and hang round the bar a bit more… Hmmmm….

The Finish Fone makers all you can eat music download service has just expanded its buffet table, to seat other countries that weren’t previously allowed at the table.

In a very tentatively  linked intro that no doubt you’ll forgive us for one day, Nokia has opened up its music store to include other countries tracks rather than just English singing artists.

Local dialects that are now featured range from France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway and of course Finland. More are undoubtedly to be scheduled within time, as they’ve missed a few places off that list that they are in, and are doing rather well in too.

Later on in this quarter of the year, Singapore and Australia performers will be available within Nokia’s download store. With the latter really being English speaking and singing, so forgive us once again for our discretions before you start writing in saying Australians sing in English as well.

Hitting all the right notes, they’ve started to gain even more ground against iTunes with this new pan European licensing agreement that’s bound to be a right kick in the Apples.

What’s next on this list we believe is for the service to be included out of the box on more and more handsets. With a view to making it backwardly available whenever they refresh a SKU or a series. Only the other week we brought you news of the N96 now starting off this trend, so it’s not too far a stretch of the imagination for this to be on the cards for the future.

We also put it to Nokia in an almost open letter at the end of that piece, the store “needs to be expanded to accommodate TV episodes and movies“. Over lunch the other day with some senior people at Nokia this was mentioned in conversation, where it was said there’s a reason for Nokia opening up an office in Hollywood a while ago.

So, you’ve read it here first folks. Nokia’s next venture is entitled ‘Comes With Video’, or it’s bound to be something quite close to that *cough*