Sometimes you can glean more from the companies and themes that fail to make an appearance at the Mobile World Congress than those that do have a strong presence.

Notable absentees from the event this year were Apple – although this was not particularly surprising given Apple’s track record of attendance at trade shows generally. More surprising perhaps was the limited presence from Google particularly given its involvement in Project Android and in the mobile sector generally.

On the vendor side very little mention was made of IMS although ‘IP transformation’ generally was a theme. UMB was totally absent from the show and the only issue here is whether Qualcomm officially abandons the next generation mobile network initiative or allows it to slowly wither. Mobile TV technologies – and in particular DVB-H – were conspicuous by their absence and the only mobile TV announcement of any note was of a joint MBMS initiative from Orange and T-Mobile.

WiMAX was by no means absent from the show but there was certainly less support from the major infrastructure vendors than in previous years. Most surprising was the absence of mobile WiMAX devices, especially from Motorola which has been such a keen backer. Given the aggressive timetable for LTE, mobile WiMAX really needed to have a greater visible presence at the show in order to demonstrate its time to market advantage.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 9:01 am by Networks, Handsets & Devices, Mobile Operator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.