Nothing much happened on the 4th day which is the last day of MWC, I did not go down to the conference because I will be flying back to Singapore that day.

Woke up at about 9am and went down for breakfast and went back up to my hotel room after that to get my stuff packed. I have requested for my transport to come at 2pm despite my flight is at 6.30pm as I wanted to claim tax refund (18%) and shop at Barcelona Airport!

Beef Burger

Had a simple lunch down at our hotel’s cafe with Katie from 1000heads before bidding her goodbye!

When my transport came to pick me up, I realized that it is the same driver who picked me up from the airport when I arrived in Barcelona!

I reached Barcelona Airport at about 2.45pm and took me 10 minutes to find the stupid tax refund counter. It is hidden all the way to the left side of the airport. I think they purposely isolate it so that you will have problems finding it. You can get a tax refund of 18% and to my surprise there is no queue at all to get your tax refunded. However the attitude of the officer at the counter is really horrible.

Tax Refund Isolated Corner

Take a look at the picture above, there is no indication saying that you can refund tax there except the small “TAX FREE” icon which is so small and located right at the bottom of the sign.

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Day 03 starts off with the same format as day 02, which is a breakfast Q&A with the Nokia Maps team (Pino Bonetti & Mark Thomas).

Pino Bonetti (Left), Mark Thomas (Right)

Nokia Maps update will be out soon for Nokia Lumia devices which gives you greater zoomed-in details as well as the ability to create and share your favorite places via social networking sites.

Nokia Maps is there to help you, whether you’re in a car, or on foot.

When you’re in hurry it can be confusing to see every eating choice, or art gallery – you only want to know where you’re going.

That’s why Nokia Maps has also been updated for Windows Phone to make the experience simpler, with fewer intrusive objects and signs to get in the way of where you want to go – and a reduced colour palette to allow the brain to process information more easily.

Now you can zoom in to get all the detail you need, and pull back for larger context about what route you need to take – with pedestrians and drivers seeing different maps to reflect their different experiences.

With the updated Nokia Maps you can now also create and collect your favourite places, and access places you’ve recently visited.

Then, if you’re travelling with friends or colleagues, you can share your route with SMS email or social networks.

Nokia Maps now covers over 190 countries – and uses the latest technology to make sure that images are viewable from any browser, device and operating system.

Nokia Drive 2.0 will be out soon which will get full offline. In the pipeline is Nokia Drive 3.0, which is a bigger update that allows you to pin your trip to the live tiles of your home screen. It will also learn your daily commute routes and automatically adjust your routes depending on the day’s traffic.

Nokia Drive has been one of the most popular services on the Lumia, offering free turn-by-turn voice guided navigation in over 100 countries, with multiple views, larger icons for in-car arms length use, one easy search box, and fast route calculation and preview.

Now Nokia Drive on Lumia gets full offline support, with offline search and routing from calculating a route, to navigation and re-routing. A newly designed dashboard now shows speed limit alerts, as well as the speed you’re travelling at, as well as estimated time or arrival, time to destination and distance to destination. You can also access a list of recently saved destinations through a single tap, and then start turn-by-turn navigation.

Nokia Public Transport is a new app that will be rolled out to existing Nokia Lumia devices. Nokia Transport will give you an real-time arrival timing of public transportation such as train and buses. If you city does not have any these data available, the timing will be estimated. For Singapore/Malaysia case, it will be estimated instead of real-time. I really hope Nokia can work with LTA to get the real-time information which is already available out there.

Nokia Public Transport is a natural complement to Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive as part of navigating your life – and is now available as an app on the Nokia Lumia.

Nokia Public Transport is a unique service that allows you to plan fast inner-city routes from point to point, and work out your time of arrival.

Using Nokia Public Transport you can see when the nearest train, bus, tram or metro leaves, find out how to get to the station, discover if you need to change trains or lines along the way, and then use walk routing to reach your final destination.

Check out My Nokia Blog: Mega Q&A session: Lumia/WP Production/Design, Maps, Entertainment & More for more details of the morning Q&A.

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Day 02 was slightly more relaxing, we have a breakfast Q&A with Dean Patrick from Nokia Entertainment at our hotel cafe at about 9am

Dean Patrick From Nokia Entertainment

Dean showcase the new Nokia Reading which of course as the name sounds, allow you to read and buy e-books/audio books on your Lumia devices. It will come to existing Lumia devices in April 2012.

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The first day of MWC begins at 6am as the bus will be coming to pick us up at 7am from the hotel.

The Nokia booth is located in Hall 7 which is about 8 minutes walk from the main entrance. The press conference begins at 8.30am. We reached the MWC venue at 8am but the main press conference hall is already full! So they placed us in an “overflowing” hall which is just beside it. This also means we can’t see the press conference live and everything is projected out for us to see in the hall.

Nokia Banner Outside Hall 7

Overflowing Hall

Steven Elop Being Projected

Nokia announced 6 phones during the press conference:

• Nokia Asha 202
• Nokia Asha 203
• Nokia Asha 302
• Nokia Lumia 610
• Nokia Lumia 900 (Non LTE)
• Nokia 808 PureView

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Thanks to Nokia & Nokia Connects, I had the privilege to attend Mobile World Congress 2012 (MWC 2012) (27th February 2012 – 1st March 2012) which is held in Barcelona, Spain.

Took Lufthansa flight for the first time. There is no direct flight to Barcelona for Lufthansa and hence I took a flight (LH779) to Frankfurt, Germany and another flight (LH1124) from Frankfurt to Barcelona, Spain.

It is about 13 hours flight to Frankfurt and with a layover time of about an hour and another 2 hours flight to Barcelona.

While I was entering the gate, they told me that my seat has been changed, I was like WTF? I asked them is it still an aisle seat, and the told me no, they upgraded me to business class! I was so happy as it was my first time seating in a business class and the flight is 13 hours long!

Here are my flight details just for archiving purposes:

• Flight No.: LH779
• Flight Hours: 13 hours
• Departure: 23:55 on Saturday, 25th February 2012 (Terminal 2, Changi Airport, Singapore)
• Arrival: 05:55 on Sunday, 26th February 2012 (Terminal 1, Frankfurt Airport, Germany)
• Layover Hours: 1 hour 20 minutes
• Flight No.: LH1124
• Flight Hours: 2 hours
• Departure: 07:15 on Sunday, 26th February 2012 (Terminal 1, Frankfurt Airport, Germany)
• Arrival: 09:15 on Sunday, 26th February 2012 (Terminal 1, Barcelona Airport, Barcelona)

I reached Barcelona at about 9am on Sunday, 26th February 2012. Barcelona is 7 hours behind Singapore (GMT+1). This time round, I don’t have any jetlag compared to my first trip to Europe which is to London for Nokia World 2011.

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