The Nokia N82 Wireless Adventure - Super Fun!
a few days ago i participated in a race that took 5 HOURS.
and it was mad fun :D
the Nokia N82 Wireless Adventure is a race where eight teams of 1 media member + 1 member of the public will compete to discover Malaysia’s ‘Soul of the Night’ in 5 hours, using only your smarts and the spankingly fabulous Nokia N82. all teams will be given a list of types of nighttime places to go (eg: a place to go drinking at night), and immediately you will have 5 hours to find these places and take pictures of each location and upload ‘em all onto the N82 site.
catch? these places have to be unique and obscure while still attractive; extra points for you if the judges have never heard of these places. the theme if after all, discovering the soul of the night :)
the 4 bloggers invited to participate: me, pop, kim, suanie. all pictures stolen off Facebook and other people :P
Suanie, Kimberlycun, Smashpop and myself were the 4 bloggers invited to form the media halves of our respective teams, and we were to be randomly paired up with one of the 8 finalists who signed up and auditioned for the race.
the 8 teams for the Nokia N82 Wireless Adventure
the night before the race, we were all called in for a briefing at the One World Hotel in 1 Utama, where we were introduced to the Nokia N82 and our fellow contestants. the Nokia N82 is DAMN NICE okay - it’s that phone from the ads where these people who have lost their way use Nokia Maps to find their way to wherever they need to go, and the directions are given out through a voice function? we were to use this Nokia Maps application to aid us in our race (key in any location and the phone gives you a direct route to that location from wherever you are, using A-GPS), and really, this maps application is but a teeny tiny fraction of just how awesome the phone is. i don’t think i’ve ever touched anything as techie as the N82.
best part? we all got to keep the phones :P teehee.
David and i - Team Pink! best team colour everrrrrr!
we were also introduced to our teammates at the briefing. my teammate was David Liow, who blogs at Narrowband.org, and is Shawn Yue’s twin :P sigh yalar i got the most lengchai partner, why am i so lucky. and we make the most awesome team, because while i’m familiar with nighttime places in KL and i can write, David is a total techie who’s a great photographer AND he’s familiar with the NSeries phones cos he uses the N95. hahahahaha! best team ever or what?
i am totally loving Nokia right now because they spoiled us silly during the race. we got to stay the night in these really nice deluxe rooms at the gorgeous One World Hotel, dinner was at 1U’s Delicious, lunch the next day was a flipping 4-course one at Bakerzin :D and did i mention that WE GOT TO KEEP THE N82???
*happy*
flag-off: ready set go!
so after that yummy lunch, we mingled around for a bit, took pictures, were interviewed by the media, did some last minute strategizing, and at 4.30 PM it was flag-off. we got our list of places on the screen, quickly downloaded it onto our phones, and off we went :D this was our list:
1. Discover a good place for live entertainment in the Klang Valley
2. Discover a good spot with a night-view of Kuala Lumpur
3. For games in the evening, where do people go?
4. Discover an eatery that serves great food
BONUS: 5. Discover a place for great evening shopping
i was feeling quite confident because David and i knew exactly which places to go after a quick 10-minute brainstorming in our designated car, which was a sleek Cefiro driven by the world’s nicest driver :P you see, the drivers for the race are not supposed to assist you in the directions. you cant just tell him, ‘we want to go to KLCC’, and expect him to take you there. all teams must give directions to their driver with the aid of Nokia Maps, and even if we give him wrong directions, he’s not supposed to correct us :P but our driver, Ibrahim, was sooooo nice because he said we didnt have to give him directions. hahaha. so all we had to do was sit in the backseat and bicker while our marshal and cameraman tried not to laugh at us :P
the race cars : 2 participants, 1 marshal, 1 cameraman and 1 driver
we made quite good time and covered all our 4 places AND our bonus location within 4 hours, but our problem was uploading the pictures and writing captions quickly. me being the perfectionist i am spent a lot of time agonizing over each and every caption of our 25 photos.. and then we spent even more time resizing the photos and bluetoothing it back and forth between our phones (only one phone gets the SIM card), and then uploading it onto the race’s website.
PANIC!!!!
we arrived back at 1 Utama about 20 minutes short of end-time. i thought with so much time, we would be the first to arrive back (and hence get to use the laptop to upload), but NO. we were like the SEVENTH team to arrive back, and all the laptops were already taken up. at this point, we’d only uploaded and captioned one out of our five albums. sei mou. as we were sitting on the floor frantically uploading all our remaining photos, my infamous stress/angsty mode was out full force oredi. one marshal tried to give me a plate of food and i smacked him away. another one asked me some question about something and i screeched back at him, ‘DONNO DONNO DONNO!!!’. hahahaha cracks me up just thinking about it. sorry ah, kind marshals who only wanted to help me :( sorry David Lian for being so angsty while you helped me connect my phone to the Wifi :( sorry David my partner for being so stressed and panicky in the car and at 1U :( you all still love me wan right?
my stressed face :P
by some stroke of miraculity (is this a word) and because one laptop was finally available, we managed to upload all our pictures in time. after deliberation by the panel of judges who are all experts in their respective fields, Suanie’s team was announced champion. congrats Suanie and Frankie!!! :D AND NO, SMASHPOP, YOUR TEAM WAS NOT RUNNER-UP *angsty*
so Suanie and Frankie won an all-expenses-paid trip to Hong Kong along with RM 1,500 cash each! the rest of us got Robinsons’ vouchers worth RM 500. i’m happy :D SHOES-TIME!!! does Robinsons not stock the best shoes.
it really was such a fun race :) it combined a lot of my favourite things - the city, food, arts, photography, writing, storytelling, friends, discussion and competition ;) i’m so glad i got to be a part of this. thank you David, Eevon, Text100 and Nokia for this amazingly fun experience!!
will put up all the pictures of our team’s 5 locations in the next post :) can guess where we went anot! give you one buck if you can!!
62 comments April 8th, 2008
