By Mark Brown

Kenton Cool, a British mountaineer with an utterly amazing name, claims to be the first man to have tweeted from atop Mount Everest. He’s not.

His towering Twitter message, posted on May 6, reads “1st tweet from the top of the world thanks to a weak 3G signal & the awesome Samsung Galaxy S2 handset!” Samsung sponsored Cool’s ascent and gave him a free Android handset to tweet from.

Don’t let the groan-worthy product placement put you off (including Cool wearing a Galaxy II T-shirt in the nippy conditions, and pulling a boxed phone from a precut hole in the ice). Tweeting from Everest is a pretty impressive achievement. But, unfortunately for Samsung and its PR team, Cool’s tweet isn’t the first.

American polar-explorer Eric Larsen beat the Brit by about six months. His tweet simply read, “Everest summit!” and a description of the gadget used to tweet from 29,029 feet above sea level.

It was the DeLormeGPS Earthmate PN-60w, a handheld device that can send short text messages from anywhere in the world by relaying them through a satellite. According to the device’s product page, “users can type and send text messages to individual e-mail addresses, cell phones and social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook.”

Larsen is no stranger to extreme-tweeting, a new sport we just invented. In April 2010 he tweeted from the North Pole. “Standing on top of the world,” he wrote. “Getting to the North Pole is the same as stopping Global Warming. Begin with one step.”

So Cool might have missed out on a cool record, but he’s still got one achievement under his belt — besides his nine climbs up the planet’s highest mountain, of course. The veteran mountaineer called his wife from the summit, marking the world’s first 3G phone call from Everest. If you thought the largest mountain on Earth would be a good place to get away from the connected world, think again.

Last October, Nepali mobile operator Ncell launched a 3G base station at 17,000 feet up the mountain range (making it the highest cell tower in the world), letting tech-obsessed trekkers live-tweet their expedition. By the end of this year, Ncell plans to provide mobile coverage to more than 90 percent of the people in Nepal.

This post was originally published by Wired UK.

Photo: @KentonCool