The TRUTH about Product Launches and the MWC 2017

The mobileworldcongress, the largest gathering for the mobile industry taking place in barcelona. A lot of companies release new products there, LG, Sony, Samsung, just to name a few. I did read a couple of comments in the last week of people posting ” you got paid to do this ” , “why did you get the device so late ” and much more. So i thought i willrelease a full vlog of the whole trip to barcelona to show you the truth about those tradeshows and how exhausting they really are.

Its the 25th of march and right now i’m packing my gear vienna and move to the airport to catch my plane to barcelona. Flo is flying one day later with sony, they paid his trip because they are releasing a couple of new phones and usually big companies invite the press to those events and pay all the expenses like the flight, hotel, taxi and food. But they mostly only invite one person per media, that means i had to find another company, but time was too short and i couldnt find any, so i went the budget way and booked the cheapest flight and a supercheap airbnb. So no luxury trip, but alot of fun.

On the first day i arrived and just tried to find my Airbnb and also meetup with Linus from TechlineHD to discuss what we are going to do in the next days. After a couple of hours of sleep, i woke up on the second day, packed my gear and met with linus. We took a cab to the LG G6 launch event and filmed the brand new G6, check this video here:

Too bad that we found out that all the american bloggers got the LG G6 a week earlier on a american exclusive LG G6 launch event. So we had no chance to provide a nice review at the time of the launch, also we still have not received a review sample yet. After the LG G6 event, we had to head to the huawei p10 launch event. We were pretty stressed because we left the LG G6 event 30 minutes before the Huawei event started and there was no cab near our location and the number to call one didn’t work. So we did run in direction of the huawei event and after 10 minutes, we finally found a cab. So we arrived on time, but the queue to the event was huge.. Actually Huawei invited too many people and after the event was already over, we were still not inside of the building. After 4 hours in the line, we finally managed to get our P10 Review Sample, but we missed the showstoppers event. After the Huawei disaster, we took the metro to the Huawei press conference. Unfortunately no news about the Samsung Galaxy S8, just some new tablets. So we filmed the Galaxy Tab S3, talked to some people and enjoyed the show. Totally tired after the event and some beers, we went to sleep for the next exhausting day.On monday, the first day of MWC, we met again in the morning to film some scenes for our Huawei P10 Review, which you can find here:

Then we attended the MWC for the first time. It’s amazing how big it is, huge halls full of smartphones and companies. We did shoot a couple of videos of the new Sony Xperia XZ Premium, Huawei Watch, Samsung and some more things. Just a couple of hours in the halls and then we had to leave and take the metro to the PEPCOM event. This is a small event where you can check out the latest technologies from some companies and also network with them. I really like it because you meet great people and well there is free food and drinks ! We also met Max Lee from Zedomax “high on Android” , ash taylor, juan from pocketnow and some guys from androidauthority. I really liked this event and it’s always a pleasure to be part of it. After the event was over, i was a bit drunk and wasted, but we had to cut some videos, so we took a taxi to linus airbnb and started editing videos.

The next day was actually my last day @ MWC 17. We left the house pretty early and tried to be at 9am at MWC. There we filmed all important things and checked also oppo’s latest camera technology. I also prepared for my livestream on Radio One Lebanon (which is btw every thursday, so join in). Then we got wasted again.. too much free beer and other drinks. But well I had so much fun that evening. We talked to 2 people from Netnumbers and I tried to figure out what they are doing… but even after talking with them for 1 hour, I still have no clue what they do. We had some more beers and then I switched off the fuses of the light on the toilet (yes another drunk action)… After that we went again to Linus apartement and finished the Huawei P10 Video and some more. This was also the last night for me in Barcelona and on the next day I already had to catch my plane back to Vienna.
So thats how the average tradeshow looks in reality. You don’t see anything from the city, you are superbusy with filming and making the videos, atleast if you are a oneman show like here on techmagnet and also you don’t get paid to film the devices here. YouTube is actually alot of work, and it’s super hard to compete against the big players like androidauthority, pocketnow or whatever. Because they have a big team and can split up,they get the devices sometimes even earlier and also mostly their trips are sponsored. Also they are based in the USA where almost everything is launched earlier and money for companies is not such a big problem like here in europe. To be honest, we are currently financing 99% of the channel over adsense and only a sponsored video every couple of months. It’s pretty hard to survive in the big world of YouTube and even harder to grow and evolve. But to be honest, i never thought that i will be here where I am standing right now, when i started youtube. And I’m glad for everyone who is watching my videos, you guys are keeping the channel up and i really appreciate that. So thats the truth about tradeshows, we actually just go there to meet with people, try to reach out to companies and also to film a bit. Alot of work and sometimes also quite expensive, but always alot of fun.