I went to the Hong Kong iPhone tech talk today. I don’t think it violates the NDA to give my impressions of the event, but if it does I suppose the Apple lawyers can tell me.

It was a pretty chill event downtown. I had kind of a bad morning. I couldn’t sleep, and then when I finally did I woke up too early, 5 am. I had to actually get up at 6:30, so I ended up just staying awake. That means I got about 3.5 hours!

Hong Kong winter is really nice in the morning. Very crisp. I was feeling pretty good until I ended up waiting for a bus to Choi Hong for 20 minutes. Five empty buses to Hang Hau for every full bus to Choi Hong. I don’t know what the deal is, some failure in the system…

Anyway, finally got there. I had a lot of trouble staying awake, just because of my state. As for the content, it was all very beginner level stuff. It was like programming for iPhone 101. Granted, it was a two tier system and I only went to the lower tier stuff, but even the higher tier stuff looked pretty simple.

This wasn’t what I was expecting at all. I expected more small groups and breakout sessions with one on one time with engineers. There was none of this besides the 15 minutes between sessions.

Oh well, the “beginner level” stuff was actually exactly what I needed considering I had only toyed around with Xcode for about an hour. I think this may have been deliberate. After all, this is the first year of official iPhone in Hong Kong. Maybe next year, they can operate under the assumption that Hong Kong will have many “seasoned veterans” from the first year and they’ll have more of a developer discussion.

The Apple Asia team seemed really nice. It seemed like it would be a nice place to work.

I love the Apple details. They gave out t-shirts to all attendees, and the cardboard box that holds the t-shirt has more design and usability thought put into it than most OEM laptops.