I went to my first Bay Area Mobile Forum meeting yesterday - as I consider it crucial to have mobile devices part of the digital lifestyle aggregation scenario.

It’s ugly.

It’s fucked up.

Lord help us if it gets any worse. Verizon (despite their Cory Doctorow look alike campaign) are stone fascists. This is gonna catch up with them soon enough.

Ray Rischpater from a company called Rocket Mobile was there to fill us in on the gory details fo something called BREW. STAY AWAY! is all I can say.

Meanwhile Russel Beattie and other experienced mobile nerds grokked what they needed so that they could understand the motivations and issues surrounding BREW.

As bad as it is - Verizon alone has 40M BREW phone subscribers and that means money. There’s lots of money to be made out there with BREW.

And Oil, and the military industrial complex. And slavery - too.

But I met some coolio peeps too. One who’s got a coolio new aggregator coming - who didn’t want me to say anything about it so…..

Hurry up Dan!

CLARIFICATION: Russel Beattie has asked me to clarify what I meant by fucked up. Indeed - Russell tried to help me get the 200 images on my 7610 off onto my PC. No luck!

I was hoping that Roland Tanglao could have helped me - but I’m headed to Portland instead of Vancouver, so that’ll have to wait. Menawhile I’m still holding off on the full roadshow report till I get those images.

But Russel’s answer to me about my Bluetooth file transfer woes - typifies the state of smart phones, fancy features and bleeding edge mobile stuff today = “Get a card reader.”

Ugh - this is after spending $50 thinking that the cable was bad.

My oh my - what can I say. No Russ - it ain’t the BAMF that’s fucked up - but the whole dam thing.

Though they’re called Vodafone throughout Europe - each fiefdom has it’s own ridiculous roaming charges - as I poured money into staying on the grid - everywhere I went in Europe. That shit has got to stop.

So is stupid policy of charging .10p for every ping to idenitify location from cell towers - that Simon Grice and Midentity have to put up with in England.

And most of all - though I DEARLY love the Cory Doctorow look alike - it’s pathetic that the only value added feature Verizon can claim over the competition - is that you can actually get a signal.

What can I say? It takes money to make money - and the cell phone world is locked off from us - for the time being.

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