What I did discover is the following (that will only be of interest to Germans, that can read English. (note-to-self: Maybe widening your niche area might result in more visitors!)

As I went from shop to shop I tweeted my findings:

Vodafone and 02 have confirmation that the Droid / Milestone is coming. I’m a Vodafone customer who’s contract finishes in Feb so this is interesting to me but there’s something even more interesting.

O2 have an interesting ‘transparent’ system where they’ve separated the phones and contracts into different products. A phone is free and costs 5,10,15 or 20 per month over 2 years. It allows them to sell voice and data services on a month-by-month basis. You can combine multiple products in different ways which benefits someone like me who rarely makes a voice call but is connected to the data channel for most of the day. I’ve been offered a Motorola Milestone/Droid for 20 Euro per month / 24 months (480 Euros) I can then add a 0 Euro per month voice contract. (0,15 Euros per call/sms) and then (and this is the cool part) add a 300MB or 5GB HSPA (in Bonn) contract on for 10 or 25 Euro per month. (Actually they are both flat rate data but throttle down to GPRS after the limit is reached.) For 45 Euro per month I get a Droid and 5GB of lovely 7.2mbps data. Vodafone, you’ve got about 5 days to offer me something else because apparently the Milestone/Droid will be here next week.

Other updates: Amazon have one weeks exclusivity on the Nkia N900 in Germany. Nokia shop gets it one week later. (Should be under 2 weeks)

I didn’t get a chance to talk to the T-Mobile people about the HTC HD2. It’s coming soon and it looks like it will be exclusive to T-Mobile for a while as no-one else knew anything about it. The T-Mobile shop was rammed full so I left. Maybe I’ll check them out again later.

I spotted the Omnia Pro B7610 in a few shops and spoke to one person about why it took too long to reach the shelves in Germany. ‘Germany is a different place’ he said. ‘Everyone else is casual about faults but it’s different in Germany.’ I had to laugh out loud because it’s so true. The Germans are the best quality control testers in the world!

It’s funny how a walk around the shops results in a different conclusion to browsing the web. There’s an extra special element of excitement that can catch you unaware. Right now I’m seriously thinking about the Milestone for next week. If I get it I’ll start a sub-blog droid-milestone.carrypad.com My only worry is that I will end up with a QWERTZ keyboard.

I’ve always said that Twitter needs out-of-band GPS  information in order to make tweets more relevant to the user and to be able to filter out countries or events when needed and the announcement from Twitter last week that they are working on it literally kept me awake the other night as I thought about the scenarios that would form.

There are two great things about Twitter that make this announcement very interesting. First is that Twitter has millions of users. It’s well established and well past the critical mass needed to keep it going. Secondly, Twitter won’t be making the apps themselves. Just as before, apps will be developed by third parties that dream up cool ideas meaning you can switch between clients and features without losing your data or history. This makes is quite unique and as far as I’m concerned, lines Twitter up to be the #1 location based service within a very very short time.

Clearly there are security and privacy issues to be dealt with. One hopes that Twitter puts strong guidelines in place and that application developers will consider them but ignoring that for a minute, just think about what’s going to happen.

Location means mobility and GPS. Of course you’ll be able to take advantage of location data on your desktop or laptop but the smartphone and mobile internet operating systems are where the action is going to really happen and are really going to be fun. Smartphones with GPS will be able to add location information and show local information either as a separate search or highlighted in the normal stream as you move through different areas. PC’s will fall behind here.

A few ideas…

• Viewing historical location information
• Viewing live local information
• Friend Radar
• Local Events
• Local advertising

One area where geo-enabled tweets will take off immediately is local advertising. Imagine you are tuned into a local stream of everything going on, which I imagine a lot of people are going to do. It only takes one geo-enabled tweet from an advertiser to appear on your stream. ‘Big Mac available half price for the next 30 minutes’ or ‘Happy Hour just started at Coopers’ or ‘Tracy is bored. Wanna meet round the corner?’  is a message you’re going to see a lot. Companies with large numbers of outlets are going to be banging out location-based twitters in huge numbers. Many times more than they did previously! Accounts with _us or _uk at the end will be common too as the advertisers try and hide the big amount of advertising going out!

Unfortunately, the rewards in this area are going to be big and application developers and advertisers will jump on it very quickly. I really hope it doesnt damage the Twitter / Geo ecosystem before it becomes really useful. Having a high-rate account option on Twitter to transport this information is a must-have. This could be an important revenue stream for Twitter while providing an easy way to control the information.

Friend Radar is one to watch although having a blanket on/off location service is going to be difficult. Google Latitude sorted this problem out early with per-friend sharing. Again, it depends on how the applications develop. Sub-accounts or groups (as per Friendfeed) could be a way to deal with it. Joining with Google is another option!

Events and information will take off quickly and it would be great to see busses and trains tweeting their location in real time. Weather agencies need to get up to speed on this too. It’s not only very interesting for many people to know the weather, it’s a very very simple way to save lives. Road traffic information is a good application too and I can’t wait for the first 3G and twitter-enabled navigation application. Nokia are in a good position to be able to do this on Maemo very quickly.

The possibilities are endless and with such a head start and open ecosystem it’s possible that twitter becomes the de-facto channel for sharing ANY geo data. In my opinion, Twitter have just positioned themselves as an important layer for the Internet. Early players will stand to gain a lot.

Twitter: Location, Location, Location