Mobile World Congress:Two themes dominated the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week - the environment and social networking. Like the rest of the technology industry, the wireless world wants to clean up its act, writes John Collinsin Barcelona
In Barcelona, that was displayed in everything from Ericsson operating a timber frame eco-café powered by the sun, to China Mobile chief Wang Jianzhou using his keynote to highlight how the world's most popular network is recycling batteries and trying to reduce its power consumption.
Many industry-watchers are sceptical of new-found green credentials in a sector that produces massive amounts of electronic waste that is hard to recycle.
China Mobile did recycle three million phone batteries last year; it was, however, adding five million new subscribers a month. It has also controversially erected a mobile phone mast at the base camp of Mount Everest.
A battle royal for the soul of mobile phones is about to break out as web companies like Yahoo, Google and Facebook square up to the operators as each tries to create the massive success of social networking websites on the mobile phone.
In a sign that the operators feel under pressure, Vodafone global chief executive Arun Sarin cautioned networks against "becoming a bit pipe" and said they would have to be "a provider of services as well".
The mobile operators have only themselves to blame for the situation in which they find themselves.
For years they clung to the model of the "walled garden" - keeping users from accessing content or services that they did not control and closely guarding access to their subscribers by third parties.
As a result, their cobbled versions of mobile internet and other services failed to find favour.
The web giants have brought open standards to the party and, to be fair to both the operators and handset makers, they are embracing the new era enthusiastically. Despite competing on operating systems, Google and Nokia have done a deal on search.
The Finnish handset maker is not monogamous, however, and already has similar relationships with Yahoo and Microsoft.
Every second handset you picked up in the massive Hall 8, where the giants of the mobile world congregated seemed to offer applications from Google, Yahoo or Facebook and the promise that your phone was going to be an extension of your online life.
Just as advertising is the business model to support consumer web services, mobile advertising is being revisited through a number of initiatives. Nokia announced its premium advertising network with support from publishers and operators like Reuters and Sprint, while the Mobile Advertising Alliance, a consortium dominated by Irish software companies, is offering all the technology needed to deliver a variety of advertising and marketing.
Apple didn't formally attend the show even though iPhone-like touchscreen interfaces were the order of the day for many of the top manufacturers.
There was less hype around mobile television this year, with commercial services now running in a couple of European markets. The focus now is on rolling out services.
John Maguire, of Irish company S3, predicts the dual fillip of the Olympics and the European Football Championships this summer will drive TV on the mobile into the mainstream in 2009.
Mobile broadband - which provides PC connectivity over mobile networks using faster 3G technologies like HSDPA - was another common talking point.
Ericsson executive Magnus Ewerbring said there were now 174 commercial HSDPA networks around the globe, with speeds of up to 7.2 Mbits/sec.
Operators are excited about the technology as they have not seen such large uptake in subscriber numbers since pre-pay voice services were introduced in the late 1990s, according to industry analyst John Strand.
The upbeat mood and massive amounts of money spent marketing in Barcelona this week suggest that that is not the only thing in the industry reminiscent of the late 1990s.
