Gadgetory

tradeshows might be on the decline but they're not dead yet shows like Mobile World Congress are still some of the best places to go if you want to get your hands on smartphones and tablets before they hit store shelves but watching from home you don't get the full experience you get a few hands on videos maybe a podcast a hangout or two but you never get a glimpse behind the scenes to see what covering a trade show like mwc is really about so what is it all about I'm Michael Fisher this is pocket now and this is pocket now insider episode to trade shows are held all over the world but the one constant always seems to be that they're held thousands of miles from your home so covering a show always starts with a long airplane or train ride more often than not accompanied by a big helping of jet lag as you get acclimated to your new environment you need to get the essentials that includes the usual stuff like food water and coffee seriously a lot of coffee but if the show is outside your home country it also means getting a new local SIM card so you still have data and voice hopefully you've picked out the smartphone you most prefer to cover the show before hand at mwc 2013 both Anton and I predominantly used the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 who's sharing functionality and long battery life helped us out quite a bit no Samsung didn't pay is to say that it was just Tony and me for this one by the way so we were stretched a little thin this time around covering a show often means the opportunity to see a lot of awesome sights and take in a lot of foreign culture but when the time comes for the show itself its work solid hard work we rise early often before the Sun because there are lines everywhere more than 72,000 people were in attendance at Mobile World Congress this year and getting up late means waiting behind all of them for hands-on opportunities we always want to be the first so we're often up with the Sun or slightly before it after an event there's more pushing and shoving as demo units are uncovered and it's a constant struggle to get enough space to shoot a hands-on video surround it as we are by hundreds of other people most of them carrying heavy backpacks and video equipment just like us we shot most of mwc on a sony HDR XR 550 ve camera by the way with additional video and stills coming from a Sony NEX f3 and even our smartphone cameras in a pinch the next step is editing and uploading all that footage which we do on Final Cut Pro on a pair of macbooks from the press room because Wi-Fi or cellular on the show floor is always completely unreliable there are several press rooms available at mwc but they fill up quickly and sometimes even their internet connection is too slow so we're occasionally forced to upload videos from unconventional locations like hotel lobbies coffee shops and so on meanwhile back in the States the rest of the pocket now team is writing our shell posts and annotating the videos doing housekeeping and allowing us to focus on shooting editing and uploading until all videos are up as you can imagine the miles and miles of walking works up quite an appetite but the food at trade shows is notoriously overpriced and much of it is just plain bad so the big meals wait until evening when we leave the convention center via a packed train and grab dinner while uploading one or two stragglers sometimes there's an evening gathering a kind of post show hosted by an outside company if that's the case there's usually excellent food but more important there's still more devices so we attend these events as well at this year's MWC our hands-on videos of the kyocera torque and HP slate7 came from just such an after party after all this we take our swollen feet home to the hotel room usually a tiny one to save costs and we sit down but not to go to sleep in Spain ten in the evening is four in the afternoon in the state's perfect timing for recording episodes of the pocket now live and the pocket now weekly so if you listened to the podcast or if you joined us in a hangout from Barcelona you were probably seeing and hearing Tony and me at the very end of a long tiring but fulfilling day and yes we were probably having some pálinka or some Jack because we're old enough and because we think we earned it that's a good way to encapsulate the trade show experience overall it's exhausting it can be stressful and it's not always easy but the opportunity to be among the first people to put hands on a new smartphone or tab and to communicate that experience to you is tremendously rewarding that's why we cover trade shows and it's why we thank you sincerely for watching hope we've given you some insight into what it was like to cover mwc 2013 if you haven't seen them yet we have some other videos up including a wrap up our initial introduction and even some bloopers in addition to the 30 or so hands-on videos podcasts hangouts that we were able to do from Barcelona so check those out the meantime follow us on social media in the links below thank you for watching stay tuned for more michael fisher with pocket now we'll see you next time