MWC 2010: The highs and lows

Mobile World Congress 2010 attracted 50,000 people

Nearly 50,000 people converged on Barcelona last week to grab a slice of the multi-billion dollar pie that is the mobile phone industry. Entry prices for the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) are far too high for anyone who simply wants to gawp at the latest models - £530 to £4,300 depending on access rights.

Just about every device at MWC showed the influence of Apple's iPhone, with its sliding screens and multi-touch interface. Apple was conspicuously absent, as if it did not want to tarnish its image by consorting in public with the infrastructure providers, network engineers and operators that had made its latest cash-cow possible.

They may lack the Apple style with their dark suits and acronym-speak, but they are changing the world and they know it. Mobile phones, for better or for worse, are reaching places that have never seen fixed phones, and will give hundreds of millions of people their first online experience.

Manoj Kohli, chief executive of Indian operator Bharti Airtel, said that there are an astonishing 520 million mobile subscribers in India, a figure growing at 19 per cent a year. This means nearly five times as many phone screens as televisions in a country where just few years back you would be hard put to make a local call.

With markets like that up for grabs, the competition is feverish. Microsoft was back in the fray at MWC with the launch of the Windows Phone 7 operating system, which drops the PC Windows look-and-feel in favour of, yes, multi-touch and sliding screens.

Inevitably Windows Phone 7 looked something of a me-too product, but it would be a mistake to write Microsoft off: remember that Apple was first to mass-market (though not to invent) the desktop graphical interface, only to be spectacularly outsold by latecomer Windows.

Mobiles are a very different industry, but Microsoft can hardly lose. Its installed base will ensure healthy, if not dominant, sales of Windows Phone 7, and its back-end systems will be throwing services at mobile platforms of all flavours.

Smartphones, and tablets using the same processors, could actually widen the use of Windows. They are easily powerful enough to act as terminals fronting Windows applications running on remote servers, as in the Nirvana architecture proposed by OK Labs and Citrix. A similar setup is easily viable in a home or office Wi-Fi link to a Windows machine using the Remote Desktop Protocol.

A count of the new handsets at MWC, suggests that the Google-backed Android operating system is sweeping the world, but these are early days in the OS war. Samsung launched a new OS called Bada on a handset called Wave. It looked good, and more handsets using Bada are promised for this year.

These platforms show that if the iPhone is cool it is not exclusively so. But the OS proliferation is becoming a problem because application developers have too many targets to aim at. This is one reason Nokia and Intel announced the merger of their development platforms into a new Linux-based one called MeeGo. The other reason, of course, is to stave off the threat from Android.

Fifteen mobile operators, including Telefónica, ATT and Orange, have set up an organisation called the Wholesale Applications Community, hoping to provide developers with a single entry point to market with open standards to help create applications across a variety of platforms.

The operators, noting that Apple's App Store logged its three billionth download last month, also want a slice of the action. They have a point in saying that it is their huge investments and flat-fee mobile broadband charges that have turned handsets into a viable content delivery platform, a global market for apps, music, video, news and other content.

Speaker after speaker at MWC said that flat fees are not sustainable if networks are to get the investment required to set up fast HSPA+ and LTE services. If operators gain nothing from the content they deliver, the humble user may have to pay in the form of per-megabyte fees.

Tadashi Onodera, president of the Japanese operator KDDI, said that Amazon's model with the Kindle e-book reader offered one alternative by including a delivery charge with the cost of a download title. This is not a new idea, of course. In the old offline world it is called postage.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who predicted a major switch of advertising revenues to mobiles, was less than tactful in this context by saying that his company aimed to get a piece of every mobile transaction. He fielded hostile questions accusing his company of stealing revenues from the network.

Next-generation LTE links were causing a lot of excitement, but curiously they are likely to arrive in less developed countries sooner than in places like Europe, which is struggling to free up spectrum and can push existing infrastructure to the limits with HSPA+. In the same way, many Far Eastern cities with poor legacy infrastructure got ubiquitous fibre years in advance of Europe.

A dominant force at the show was ARM, the UK chip designer whose processor cores were in virtually all devices at the event, even in the form of embedded component controllers in some of the Intel Atom-powered netbooks.

ARM has engendered an ecology as much as a range of products because its core lies at the heart of systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) made by other companies that pack in peripheral functions including high-definition video. Dual-core and emerging quad-core ARM-based SoCs are putting desktop power into handhelds. Nvidia's latest Tegra chip can match the graphics of a PC of two or three years back.

The funniest sight at the show was of Bob Plashke, chief executive of US company Sonim, banging a nail into piece of wood using one of his rugged handsets, watched by a large and lugubrious iguana placed there for reasons known only to his marketing man.

The oddest sight was on the DoCoMo stand where a Japanese man swivelled his eyes to demonstrate how they could be made to control a handset. It did not look a technology likely to catch on.

The most notable absentee was not Apple, but the format it has highlighted with the launch of the iPad. There were very few tablets on show, although they could be seen by invitation in back rooms. Qualcomm showed a particularly sleek e-book design that could fit easily into a jacket pocket or handbag.

Some companies have undoubtedly been waiting for the iPad to see what they have to compete with. Others are fixated on mobile phones and see tablets as a convergence too far. Some simply don't 'get' the format.

The doubters may be right in that displays, ergonomics, screen textures and, in particular, input methods have a long way to go before tablets can reach their potential. Maybe 2010 is too early. We'll have to see what happens with the iPad.