Today we had the last even of the Android Developer Labs ADL 2010 in Hong Kong – hosted by Google for free! I attended and I was more than surprised about how many Android developers and interested people actually showed up. Traditionally, the development community in Hong Kong is very small. Check out a part of the long registration line here:

And that’s actually after half of the participants already checked in. The venue was considerably crowded and I would say nearly 80% of the available seats were taken.

Below at the left side you can see a banner of the Hong Kong Google Technology User Group. Seems to sound like a nice idea, if you want to know about that, check it out here: Hongkong GTUG

As I didn’t follow previous ADL events I didn’t know that every registered participant gets a free Nexus One. To my surprise, Google had a big box with loads of N1 devices and I got another one – for free! Check out the developers lining up for the free Nexus One:

Below you can see all these dudes with white Nexus One boxes.

Nice event Google! The best step is definitely to give developers free phones. You can have the best simulator / emulator, but it is always a different experience when you run your application on a real phone. This is very important proper mobile application development. You need to use your application on a real phone – only then you figure out what you actually did wrong. Google definitely understood this. Thanks Google.

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• ADL 2010 on Twitter

The T-Mobile G1 is on sale in the US for about 3 weeks now. It seems to be a quite popular phone and there already appeared some phones on ebay in the US as well as in Europe.

Yesterday I was checking out the Hong Kong mobile phone dealers on the Google / T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream). While Hong Kong is usually quite quick with new products (especially mobile phones) the G1 was not available for a while. The online shopping market is not really existing here at the moment and therefor, it is always good to check out local stores. The two best places in Hong Kong for imported gadget and high end stuff (including gadgets that are never going to be released in other markets because HK is the electronics companies’ playground) are:

• Tsim Sha Tsui
• Mong Kok

So I checked nearly every shop I could find and some of them had the T-Mobile G1 in their showcases. I was even allowed to touch one!

The G1’s price range in those shops was:

• Maximum: HK$4980 (~US$642)
• Minimum: HK$3500 (~US$451)

As you can see there is big difference of nearly US$200 between the offers but the lower price seems to be a good deal. Here are some photos from the good priced one in the shop on Nathan Road:

As far as I remember it is near Nathan Road no. 123 but I am not that sure. Might be in Burlington House or very nearby.