Phil Schwarzmann on the See into S60 Blog informed the world that some 557 people attended S60 Summit, and proudly announced that 24 members of the press and "some very special bloggers" were also expected to attend.

The S60 Summit should have been a great opportunity for press and bloggers to explore the S60 ecosystem. Are developers finding success with S60 applications? What is going well? What are the stumbling blocks? Is Carbide.c++ delivering the functionality needed to deliver great applications? How are operators taking advantage of S60? Are Samsung and LG really dedicated to S60? What a unique opportunity this should have been to gain an insight into where S60 will be taking the smart phone in the years to come.

So we were expecting a flurry of content on S60 and the Summit itself, from this assembled firepower of scribes. Particularly given that S60 continues to exert its dominance in the smart phone market.

So what insight into S60 and S60 Summit did the coverage provide?

Over at RingNokia Stefan Constantinescu seems to have attended the event, but apparently didn't find it of nearly as much interest as the joys of modern air travel, his hotel room and how to turn the electricity on, a free Nokia E61i, and Spanish wine. In all fairness it appears Stefan suffered PC problems - presumably the free E61i had lost its word processing capability, along with its email and Web browser. Despite taking Friday off work to do a write up, the event has not yet inspired him.

Matthew Miller of the ZDnet Mobile Gadgeteer blog does at least seem to have read the press releases from the event and found time to mention Carbide.C++, the hundred million milestone, and widgets. However, it apparently (according to his palmsolo.com blog) did provide the ideal opportunity to attend a bull fight.

It got marginally better on the Information Week blogs where Eric Zeman seems to have visited a small cross-section of the exhibitors and is curious about the structural reasons for the lack of success Symbian OS has achieved in the US. Even so, Eric seems to have found the event most useful as a way to gauge European interest in the iPhone, but he was soon distracted by the dominance of SMS in non-voice mobile revenues, and the fact that his GSM phone still worked in Europe.

Sadly, even Nokia's own Phil Schwarzmann seemed more interested in the "jollies" than S60.

As at the end of Thursday the best coverage came courtesy of mobile-review.com which provided a rundown of the presentations and an extensive set of photographs from the conference floor. While descriptive, these articles do not offer much insight into the Summit, almost as though it lacked any sense of excitement.

For the bloggers, S60 Summit appears not to have ignited any real interest, at least not immediately. Interesting, but not that interesting.

Blogging, like reality TV and soap operas, is essentially about living vicariously. The closest an outside observer could get to that, for the S60 Summit, was on flickr where ohl@work and Benoit.darcy were busy. However, only ohl@work flexed the power of a Multimedia Computer (in the shape of the now almost venerable N80).

So perhaps the professional journalists managed to ferret out something of interest, something to send them diving to their keyboards and the nearest WiFi hotspot. Sadly it would appear not.

So far only Telecom Magazine appears to have written about something that wasn't covered in the Summit press releases. The article Nokia Preaches To The Symbian Choir At Madrid Summit strongly suggested that the operator part of a chorus is still less than impressed.

S60 Summit seems to be a PR opportunity lost. The blogs and photos suggest that the invited press and bloggers had a really good time, so good they had little time to actually explore the S60 ecosystem. Undoubtedly more will emerge from the S60 Summit next week, but as we head into the weekend and the S60 Summit becomes old news, it also seems to have been no news either.

We can only hope that the 500 or so attendees found the event useful, because S60 would appear to have barely registered with the attending press and bloggers.