Highlights from the Mobile World Congress - Mobile Handsets & Devices
Posted by Mark Newman
February 20th, 2008
Apple may not have had a physical presence at the Mobile World Congress but its influence was everywhere – in the touch screen displays of new mobile devices, in the widget strategies of operators and device manufacturers, the use of accelerometers and in a range of different mobile music offerings.
Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X1 was the device of the show and the one which drew heavily from the iPhone for its proprietary touch screen user interface. Its main rival was the Nokia N96 – the successor to the N95 – which does not have a touch screen. LG and Samsung also unveiled new touch screen devices.
Nokia’s aggressive push in mobile content services, and self-redefinition as a media/ company, as opposed to plain old handset maker, has not so far sparked similar copycat tactics from rival OEMs. We spoke to the likes of Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, all of whom were keen to stress their desire to work alongside operators on the mobile content front.
LG did unveil an ‘unlimited music’ phone in partnership with MusicStation vendor Omnifone but this is being pitched as an operator-friendly service given that music needs to be downloaded over the air. This is in contrast to Nokia’s ‘Comes with Music’ device which also includes a year of music bundled into the price of the devices but which – along with most other devices - allows users to side load content from their PCs.
A number of devices showcased navigation capabilities but one interesting variation on this was the idea of ‘geotagging’ photos and adding metadata to them.
‘Gesture’ recognition and accelerometers were another theme in Barcelona, the industry drawing its inspiration from Wii games consoles and from the iPhone. Applications include games - as demonstrated by NTT DoCoMo - that allow the use of the mobile handset like a Wii console; the ability to ‘throw’ content from a phone to a TV screen (gesture recognition) and the ability to turn off a phone’s alarm clock simply by turning it upside down.
Other device trends include: the trend towards multiple input methods – Qwerty keypads, optical mouse and touch screens; better audio quality, as evidenced by a tie-up between Samsung and Bang & Olufsen and Sony Ericsson’s decision to embed FM transmitters in its W980 handset; and increased memory storage capability with Nokia’s N96 offering 16 megabytes of embedded memory plus 8 megabytes of expandable memory.
Broadband devices
Building on the success of mobile broadband was a major theme at Barcelona this year. While most of this success has been built on the sale of USB modems there is now a strong push towards the embedding of HSPA modems in laptops.
Ericsson said that it expected 50% of all new laptops to have an embedded module by 2011 but that prices needed to fall to $30 to achieve this. There was considerable interest in Qualcomm’s Gobi platform as a ‘global’ module that can work on 3.5G networks worldwide.
As far as form factors are concerned there were some new examples of devices that sit somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop on display in the exhibition.
Mobile handset software
Perhaps one of the least expected tie-ups in the mobile software space was between Sony Ericsson and Microsoft whose operating system will sit on the Xperia X1 smartphone.
There was also considerable interest in the continued emergence of mobile Linux as an operating system. The LiMo foundation announced a number of new members and unveiled 15 commercial handset models while a handful of chip makers demonstrated devices running Google’s Linux-based Android platform.
