MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS:This year's Mobi telecoms trade show was a quieter affair but Irish participants manage to gain international attention at the conference in Barcelona
IT WAS a much more sober global telecoms industry that gathered in Barcelona last month for its biggest annual get-together, Mobile World Congress. Memories are dim now of the late 1990s when firms including Irish outfit Logica Aldiscon chartered yachts for a week to entertain clients at 3GSM, the event’s predecessor, which used to be held in Nice. This year the talk was all about who is best positioned to survive the downturn in consumer spending, and although companies put on a brave face and did host parties, over-the-top hospitality was significantly reigned in.
The new realities were reflected in events at the Irish pavilion, the large stand which Enterprise Ireland hires each year to allow local start-ups to exhibit for far less than the five-figure fees they would otherwise face for a stand that would have any impact. In the past Ireland Inc had flown the flag and rolled out the red carpet with an out-of-town banquet, complete with Government minister in attendance. This year it was drinks and nibbles on the show floor.
Despite this, the mood wasn’t all doom and gloom among the almost 50,000 attendees and 1,300 exhibiting companies. “The mood was better than I thought it would be,” said Ivan MacDonald, chief executive of Dial2Do, an Irish firm whose software allows ordinary tasks such as sending e-mail to be carried out on a mobile using voice commands. “It wasn’t downbeat at all but there was definitely less people here.”
As usual, the big manufacturers used the event to announce their product line-up for the year. Nokia, which dominates European markets, released two new additions to its E-series of phones aimed at business users. The E55 and E75 introduced Nokia’s new e-mail client, designed to compete with the desktop experience, and both will have proper QWERTY keyboards. The latter model, with its side-sliding full-size keyboard, should prove particularly popular with road warriors who embraced the 9300 Communicator it replaces. Nokia chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo maintained that the Finnish company’s high market share would see it through the slowdown in handset sales.
Sony Ericsson, which has been hit harder by the recession than its bigger competitor, announced a new strategy that will see it focus on services and entertainment, something that the Japanese half of the joint venture has more than a little experience in. The move is part of a wider strategy by Sony called Entertainment Unlimited which will make it easy to share content between mobiles, computers and televisions.
One of the handsets that will play a key role in this strategy of integrating entertainment on the mobile with that on other devices in the home is the the Sony Ericsson Idou. Displayed in a glass cabinet, the Idou handset will arrive in the second half of the year, and promises a sophisticated touchscreen interface and a high resolution 12.1 megapixel camera.
MWC also saw the first European outing of the Palm Pre, which made its debut at the start of the year at the Consumer Electronics show – giving its maker Palm’s share price the kind of 15 per cent boost it hasn’t seen since the dot com days. Palm was a smartphone pioneer in the US, which may explain the interest, but in European it was better known as a maker of personal digital assistants (PDAs) in the 1990s. European launch details of the touchscreen iPhone wannabe were not revealed at the show, but troubled Palm will have been buoyed by the response and interest in the Pre at the show.
Speaking of iPhone maker Apple, which doesn’t do trade shows – not even Macworld, with which it is synonymous – it cast a long shadow over proceedings. Adobe’s announcement that Flash (its software which enables rich multimedia web content to be displayed on mobiles) would be available on the Pre was seen by some commentators as a snub to Apple, which still does not support Flash on the iPhone. Adobe was making a big play to talk up its mobile credentials – everything from joining forces with Nokia on the $10 million (€7.8 million) Open Screen Project development fund, which provides grants to developers for its platform, to announcing availability of Flash 10 on a slew of different handsets.
Apple’s iPhone App Store, with its sheer ease of use, has revolutionised the economics of getting software to smartphones, which – lest we forget – have the computing power of desktop PCs from just a few years ago. Last year the traditional mobile players may have privately scoffed at Apple’s entrance into the mobile space, but proving the old cliche that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they have rushed to release their own versions of the App Store.
Nokia, Microsoft, LG and the Orange mobile network all joined the fray at Barcelona, but whether they can have the same success as Apple – 15,000 applications created for the iPhone and over half a billion downloads in a little over six months – is far from sure.
Another interloper, as far as the telco traditionalists are concerned, is internet giant Google. Support for its Android mobile operating system is growing fast, with more support announced by manufacturers on the show floor. There was much excitement about the HTC Magic, a handset with 3.2 HVGA touchscreen display, which will be the first Android phone to be introduced by Vodafone in Europe later this spring. As you might expect it will be pre-loaded with Google Applications such as Gmail, Google Talk, Google Maps, Google Search and YouTube.
In its own right HTC garnered much kudos for its HTC TouchPro 2. Based on Windows Mobile, a major overhaul of which was announced at the show, it doesn’t fall into the trap of trying to ape the iPhone interface but instead innovates in new directions such as switching a call to speakerphone simply by flipping the handset over.
HTC, a Taiwanese firm, is a perfect example of the increasing importance of Asia to the telecoms industry. Asia has always played a big role in telecoms manufacturing, but Asian firms are now emerging as major players in their own right. China and other big Asian markets are also investing in so-called 4G (fourth generation) technology based on Long Term Evolution (LTE), while their European counterparts are still holding off on spending.
The Irish, as usual, punched above their weight in Barcelona. Denis O’Brien’s Digicel was lauded by conference organisers the GSM Association (GSMA) for its commitment to using renewable power sources. In an initiative part-funded by the GSMA, its network in Vanuatu has 25 base stations powered by wind and solar energy, while this summer it will launch the world’s first low-cost solar-powered mobile phone, the Coral-200-Solar. Manufactured by Chinese firm ZTE, it was designed by Dutch start-up Intivation, whose executive chairman is Prof Donald Fitzmaurice, a seasoned entrepreneur who is professor of nanochemistry at University College Dublin.
Smaller players also managed to grab global attention. Mobile video processor maker Movidia was mentioned in the same breath as Nokia in a Reuters report, while Dial2Do featured in a video report by the Financial Times personal technology correspondent on interesting handset peripherals.
But it is NewBay – the growing Dublin firm which allows operators to offer social networking and other new services – which will probably be most pleased with its investment in attending the show. NewBay won a Global Mobile Award for its LifeCache Social Networking product, which integrates with social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Bebo and Flickr.
“It’s confirmation and acknowledgement from the GSMA that we have an awesome product,” said the firm’s chief marketing officer Nagappan Arunachalam the day after the award ceremony.
He noted that major technology players such as HP and IBM were competing in the same category. Successfully competing against firms with combined histories of hundreds of years is not a bad result for an Irish firm only in business since late 2002.
