Mobile World Congress
Feb 2011
Barcelona, Spain
We attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Feb 14-17. There was an upbeat mood to the conference since last year. Sixty thousand people from around the world attended the conference, making it a record year for the show.
Tablets, NFC chips, carriers uniting against being dumb pipes were the key themes of the conference.
Mobile operators from Softbank, and DOCOMO of Japan to AT&T and Telefonica discussed ways to avoid becoming dumb pipes and gaining some upside from value added services. Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) has gotten commercial traction with eight operators.
Fourth generation network standard LTE has some work to do to become a truly global standard. And, the key players are working together to resolve that.
After years of hype, NFC is finally coming to smartphones near you. Of course, if you live in Japan, you have had this feature for a while.
The smartphone operating systems are bifurcating into operator friendly and unfriendly varieties. We also cover new smartphone features. Android fragmentation was discussed at several sessions.
Mobile health had a fair showing at this conference. Frankly, we expected more. We have the key insights for you.
Qualcomm showed a lot of multi-core chips and a good dose of augmented reality.