Reflections on Mobile World Congress 2010

We have just about managed to catch up with ourselves after the whirlwind which was Mobile World Congress last week and have taken a few minutes to reflect on the announcements and hot topics at the show.

On a general note, despite rumors before the show that attendee numbers would be down from last year, the show certainly seemed as busy as previously and was definitely more upbeat than 2009’s show.

From our perspective, the major themes at the show were:

Operating systems

• Windows Phone Edition 7 - With a design dating back nearly 10 years, Windows Mobile was well overdue an overhaul. With a dramatic redesign, this is Microsoft’s attempt to both catch up with Android and iPhone from a UI perspective and also to reduce fragmentation across the platform by standardising the look and feel of the OS. We will have to wait and see how much of a success it is, because there aren’t any phones available with the new OS yet.

• Android - A slew of new Android handsets were announced as expected. The majority of these were very similar touch screen offerings of which there are many, though there were some new form factors, most notably the XPERIA X10 Mini Pro from Sony Ericsson. The Nexus One, despite the confusion it might have caused Google’s partners and the wider handset community was undoubtedly a central part of Google’s move to reign in fragmentation on the Android platform, caused by the custom interfaces built by HTC and Motorola among others. However, with a large percentage of the new Android handsets sure to be shipping with custom Android builds, it doesn’t look like this move did much to stem this tide.

Sub-Smartphones

Two significant handset launches at the show heralded the emergence of a new category of handsets - the “sub smartphone”. The Samsung Wave and the HTC Smart both exhibit traits of feature phones and smartphones and they fit somewhere between the two, either as a dumbed down smartphone or souped up featurephone, depending on how you look at it. With the iPhone creating interest for smartphone features such as downloadable applications, there is clearly an opportunity here for handset manufacturers to capitalise on this by bringing these features to cheaper, mass market phones.

Applications

With the launch of the Wholesale Applications Community and the inaugural “App Planet” zone in Hall 7, applications were clearly a hot topic at this year’s show. Contrary to popular belief, Apple didn’t invent the mobile application (just speak to a Java developer if you are unconvinced), but the real success Apple has seen is due to its excellent delivery system which simplifies the discovery, payment and installation of apps to the point where your granny could do it. If anyone else hopes to also succeed in this market, this will be a vital focus for them.

Networks

On the infrastructure side of things, MWC ‘10 wasn’t a vintage year in terms of flashy announcements or big news. However, there was a growing consensus that the ‘capacity crunch’ much touted over the past two or three years by the majority of vendors is finally upon us, with smarter phones and datacards stretching networks to breaking point. What has become clear is that there is no one solution that will provide the instant fix (while retaining the all important profit margins) but rather a combination including the likes of LTE, traffic management and femtocells. While the hype around these technologies was less than in previous years, there was very much a feeling of work being done and progress being made.