It's a long way to go to Shanghai....

...especially to be stood up by a BT executive!

Yes, here I am in Shanghai, venue for this year's Hewlett-Packard mobility summit. It's certainly a sign of how things are changing across the industry when HP starts getting more of the pure telecoms press involved in their major events. But it's interesting also that a lot of their presentations deal with the very basics of telecoms ("has everyone here heard of 3G?" I just heard one executive ask.) The presentation by the BT guy (I'll mention no names) was also extremely basic ("in the UK we have a service called Fusion").

Well, of course not everyone that follows HP's fortunes is also going to know a lot about telecoms and service providers. The PC manufacturer certainly launched a few products today - notebook computers supporting the draft 802.11n WiFi standard as well as existing WiFi standards. Six of the seven business notebooks presented (four of which yet to ship) at the event also had added capability for 3G broadband including both cdma2000 and UMTS. Overall the company unveiled 13 new notebooks models.

There were no new wireless iPaq launches, just more on the iPaq 510 that was already launched at 3GSM and supports UMA and also has a SIP client for business users. BT has already committed to offering that with Business Fusion.

The overall message is that HP wants to increase its mobility offering and it wants to play a role in FMC.