I arrived shortly after 10PM for a Thursday night party that was advertised to be a 7 to 1AM affair. After a sweet greeting from a beautiful "door girl" I was ushered into a golf cart on Mulholland Drive to take me to this eclectic tech-mansion, as it was described. I would be lying to call it a disappointment. Beside featuring a view that rivals some of the best the Hollywood Hills have to offer, one would be hard-pressed to find a more stimulating, tech-laden home to host an event.

After my completion of a beeline to the bar I took the chance to survey the attractions. First I stopped at the GPS Nav presentation which was intriguing; (as my iPhone's Google Maps Application does not include GPS recognition of my current position) however, after talking through the similarities of my current Garmin Nuvi GPS Nav device and the traffic analyzing Google Maps application on my Apple iPhone, the rep and I could not come to any conclusions as to why I should trade in the iPhone for these new competitors. What I gathered from these kiosks is that Nokia is building devices with features to rival and even surpass the iPhone, but has yet to package them all together into the sexy all-in-one that Apple has. In some cases, to show us the maximum in features, they actually connected the N95 phone with the N800 personal computer; this created one impressive set of utilities, but required a cable, at least two hands to hold and a combined price tag of over $1000.

I'd like to say that next I experienced the Ferrari ride featured in front of the main entrance, but something held me back. Call me a sissy or maybe just a blasé youth but I was not to be persuaded with a machine, beautiful as it may be, that has little if anything, to do with the devices on display. So I settled myself into what I do best at these social gatherings, ordering cocktails. Luckily, the subsequent station I encountered was prepared. In order to demonstrate one of the N800 features I was told that I could place an order with the bar by requesting it from a nice gentleman sporting the newest, internet-based child of the Nokia family. After the gent placed my order in his nifty-looking device and we had chit chatted beyond the appropriate amount of time the waitress passed by. We promptly ordered the drink again in person and pleasantly waited another five minutes for the cocktail. The cocktail was fine, no doubt, as was the effort from the taker of my order and the waitress who delivered it, but somehow, the idea of convenience was lost in the fifteen minute wait.

So what, you say, does this have to do with you, the present and future entertainment providers of the world? These devices represent the gateway to the future of content creation and dissemination and its fusion with communication. The N95 can shoot high-quality video at 30 frames/second, the NTSC standard which means that the gap between professional video and "cell phone video" has once again gotten smaller. The N800 provides the user with what amounts to a laptop in the palm of your hands that fits in your pocket. With a flash media player built in, you can use it to watch videos (not just YouTube like the iPhone) anywhere you get Wi-Fi without downloading or storing anything. When you combine the two you could conceivably shoot a video, upload it and then watch it from the internet all on one mobile device in the span of a few minutes.

All in all, the event really was well orchestrated. The venue and the personnel couldn't have been better or tried harder; however, when you shed the somewhat over-thought entertainment contraptions, the shadow that the event planners may have wanted to bypass the most loomed large for anyone actually judging the real merits of the devices we were gathered to acquaint with. The comparison to the iPhone was inevitable and ubiquitous, and this (biased) consumer isn't sold on giving up his little slice of apple heaven just yet.

The N800-
-A personal internet experience “anytime, anywhere” (of course you must be in range of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth)
-Utilizes Opera 8 and Flash 7 (the iPhone has yet to accommodate Flash)
-High Resolution LCD display (800x480 pixels and 65,536 colors)
-Not a cell phone, however Internet calling with web camera through Skype and Google Talk
-2 internal memory card slots (which can be hot swapped)
-Boots up in approximately 20 seconds
-Linux based
-Pricetag $399
www.nseries.com/products/n800

The N95-
-The only phone with built in GPS mapping
-Wi-Fi
-MP3 player
-5 megapixel camera w/Zeiss lens
-Capture video at up to 30fps in “DVD-like quality”
-Video calling
-Play videos on home devices via TV out cable or UPnP (Universal Plug’n’Play)
-160MB built-in memory with a 2GB memory card
-Pricetag $749
www.nseries.com/products/n95