Last year Mobile TV definitely dominated the show. I found this year’s 3GSM difficult to pin
down, perhaps because it was bigger and more frantic.
Now that I’m back in the UK, it is a little easier to get a perspective on it. So here are a few observations.
I was talking to a manager from Motorola on my way back. He
thought there was more ‘content’ at this year’s show. I can’t say I noticed much content there, but he perhaps has a
wider definition of ‘content’: read the Internet getting into mobile and mobile
opening up beyond operators and handset manufacturers.
- There were several products, from games to Java portals, that did not rely on the mobile operators buying into them
- Yahoo and Google were clearly present. The former through a highly visible stand, the latter more behind the scenes, striking deals
- .mobi were there much more convincingly than they were last year
- WAP portal products were also well represented – e.g. Volantis and Momac
The network operators seemed to be taking the back seat a bit: Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange had big set-ups, but nothing particularly exciting. Only Telefonica and DoCoMo seemed to be there to show off new products and services.
Finally, I noticed GPS far more than last year. I might just have been more alert because we have been playing with it over the last 6 months, but the number of GPS navigation applications on show was remarkable. And we started to see GPS handsets being launched by most manufacturers.