At the end of September, I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to attend XDA Developer’s now annual meetup, XDA:Devcon, along with Gary (although he unfortunately couldn’t make it in the end). I was looking forward to it, not really knowing what to expect. I’d been to March of the Droids previously, so this wasn’t my first Android event, but I still wasn’t entirely sure what I was in for.

I turned up on the Friday evening for a meet and greet at the hotel where the event was being hosted, and immediately loved it when I was handed some raffle tickets and told I could exchange them for free beer at the bar! Who doesn’t love a free drink, eh?

Believe it or not, things only got better from there. I got the amazing opportunity to meet some people who I’d previously only spoken to online. I met some of the guys I used to talk to on IRC and some that I still do talk to on twitter and other social networks. It was great to have a laugh and have a few drinks with them and put some names to faces, although it took me longer than I care to admit to realise who some people were since their real names were somewhat different to their screen names. It was during this night that one of the guys from XDA announced a random giveaway for a Pebble smart watch, which I won! I staggered back home that night thinking that was probably the highlight of the event. How wrong I was.

I woke up on Saturday morning, shook off the hangover, and set off back to the hotel again for a full day of talks. After an introductory keynote from Jeremy Meiss, which I may have accidentally not arrived in time for (sorry, Jeremy), came a fascinating talk from Jan Wildeboer titled “Quo Vadis, Open {Source, Standards, World}.” This was followed over the course of the Saturday and Sunday by a number of equally interesting and insightful talks from the likes of Sony, Nvidia, Mediatek, Ubuntu and others. If you’re interested in the talks, then XDA said they’d be putting them on XDA TV shortly. I couldn’t see them when I looked, but keep an eye out as I’m sure they’re not far away!

Almost better than the talks were the giveaways. It seemed that as well as XDA themselves giving away a huge number of prizes each day, each sponsor was running their own giveaways each day from their stalls. There were a huge amount of prizes on offer for the attendees of the event. Some were given away as rewards for asking interesting questions during talks, while others were simply given away in raffles. The guys from OPPO were dishing out temporary tattoos as entries into their draw for a Find 7, resulting in a large amount of people with OPPO tattoos all over their arms and in some cases, their faces! I myself won a Sony Xperia Z3 from the awesome guys at the Sony booth in their raffle, and I also won a Jetson Tegra K1 dev kit from Nvidia in a raffle they did during one of their talks.

The best thing about the event by far, though, was the people. There were people of a variety of ages and backgrounds, and all of them were incredibly friendly and interesting to talk to. There was even a Russian guy letting people try out his Google Glass, which was pretty cool. It was quite nice just to be in an environment where I wasn’t the weird one for loving mobile technology!

I left the event on the Sunday afternoon incredibly happy to have had the opportunity to go, but at the same time bitterly disappointed that it was over. I met some old friends and made some new ones, which is pretty awesome. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to see some of them again.

I’d like to thank everyone at XDA for putting on the event in the first place and welcoming me to it, and also everyone who I spoke to while I was at the event, because you were all awesome and made the event great. As far as I’m aware, XDA haven’t yet announced the location for the next Devcon, but keep an eye out for it and go if you possibly can. You won’t regret it, I promise. And if you can’t get to it, there’s always March of the Droids here in the UK every year!