GSMA Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona has just concluded, it is the world's largest exhibition for the mobile industry and a congress featuring prominent Chief Executives representing mobile operators, vendors and content owners from across the world.
The Mobile World Congress offers the very latest in technology, services, and developments, defining the future of mobile broadband and industry's path to growth.
This year Comtaste attended to the MWC to analyze what's going on in the mobile market, both in hardware and software fields. The most relevant topics at the congress were:
- Wimax and Broadband
- Convergene
- Operating systems
- Touchscreens
- Mobile Tv
- Style and design
- Femtocells
- Mobile navigation
- Services and software: IM, Widgets, Sharing, Social Networking, Adobe Flash Lite
In the field of broadband and mobile transmission technologies Wimax dominated, it was presented as the wireless transmission of the near future. Some test at the stands showed a stable download speed of 20Mbit/s. In contrast to Wimax there were some technologies for a future to come, called 4th Generation Technologies, including 3GPP-LTE (Long Term Evolution). Also in broadband field there was a massive presence of so-called "femtocells", small domestic cells able to create a coverage area in user's apartment, providing a broadband connectivity through mobile network operator. This is a mature technology, ready to enter the market very soon, we will see if this solution will solve the problems of broadband mobile Internet and fixed-mobile convergence.
This convergence has been a major element in preview devices shown at the congress, especially in high-end smartphones. Now a mobile device that incorporates phone, photo / video camera, full keyboard, radio and music player, TV, GPS, Wifi and many other functions can not simply be called "mobile phone". The only limits of these small PCs are the immagination (and knowledge) of users and the fact that all of these functionalities and technologies could be battery-intensive and can significantly reduce battery consumption. For the first problem, however, the solution is quite easy: improve the operating system, giving to everyone a mobile that can be easily used. At the same time a good hardware interface can provide an user experience without comparisons. Among the best operating systems for mobile phones, there are Symbian OS (67% of devices), Windows Mobile (13%) and BlackBerry (10%) and among these, Windows Mobile is catching up on Symbian thanks to its new version (6.1) and some agreements with major manufacturers; nowadays only Nokia has no devices with Windows Mobile.
Others not mentioned operating systems are Linux-based ones, lead by LiMo Foundation, and the famous iPhone, which was in Barcelona only at the Telefonica stand, even if this last one is perhaps the best representative of the new generation of touchscreen interfaces, that in this period are appearing on many producers devices.
In the next post I will talk more about these devices and the other topics on the list.