Boring Barcelona?

Well, it’s been a week and the dust has pretty much settled on this year’s Mobile World Congress. The collective mobile industry is now back in the office working through their Jamon withdrawl symptoms and sorting out new credit cards/laptops/mobile phones (delete as appropriate). Having not experienced the crime first hand in previous years, ironically Oliver had his phone pickpocketed on the Wednesday evening during dinner. This combined with the many, many stories of stolen bags I heard during the week makes you wonder whether Barcelona is always this bad, or if there is a global pickpockets convention in town the same week.

As mentioned elsewhere, there was no single piece of major news dominating the headlines at the show this year, but there was some interesting stuff being shown. In no particular order here is some of it:

Micro Projectors: Despite my previous predictions, I’ll admit the show wasn’t awash with handsets boasting the in-built variety. However there were definitely some on show from folks like Microvision, and TI/Samsung.

Induction Charging: Recently announced as an optional peripheral for the Palm Pre and previously championed by Cambridge outfit SplashPower before they went into administration, Qualcomm were demonstrating a working solution on their stand. Its one of those ideas that looks quite smart, but given how much these things cost and the limited actual time/effort savings of using them over and above a bog-standard plug-in it’s hard to see them taking off at the moment.

Universal Chargers: The GSMA and the world’s top handset manufacturers agreed to work together on a “one-size-fits-all” due in 2012. This is a great idea, and some would say long overdue. Especially those who’ve got draws full of useless chargers from old handsets or who’ve had to buy new ones at £20 a throw.

High-End Smartphones: Yawn. Since I started going to this show nearly a decade ago it has been all about demonstrating the newest and shiniest smartphones and this year was no different. We had various efforts from Nokia, the aforementioned new Palm device, Toshiba, HTC and even MS showing off version 6.5 of its previously lousy software (although apparently only if you pinched the pre-release phone from some chap working for Telstra). While I’ll admit some of these phones are very good looking, I’d really like to see the R&D skills targeted on making a reasonably priced mass market phone with good battery life that’s a reasonable size. Maybe next year.

Femtocells: I’ll admit to being somewhat biased (we do the PR for Ubiquisys) however the buzz around femto continued this year, with a number of vendors showing off some neat applications which I can see being really useful. Also the possibilities of application developers building their own software is really exciting.

LTE: There were some interesting announcements around LTE, not least from Verizon/China Mobile who seem to be leading the charge in this area. Although the question abounds, what will we actually use that amount of data for? Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

So, despite the headline, all in all it was good show and the mobile industry looks to be in reasonable shape. Admittedly gone were the insane crowds and the crazy advertising wrapped tower blocks of previous years but I think that’s no bad thing (unless you work for the GSM Association in ad sales).