I think this is the last 3GSM08 post (yes, still refusing to called it MWC) I am going to make, but hey hey, it’s a light-hearted one, so why not one more….

OnePointSurveys and mBlox have released their final “Alternative Congress Stats wrap-up” - for those of you not familiar, mBlox commissioned OnePointSurveys to conduct SMS surveys of essentially non-important, light-hearted topics each day. Below you’ll find the results of the demographics survey (comments welcome), but there are also some quite amusing ones in the full results here.

• 90% of Mobile World Congress shoes are black.
• 85% people are wearing suits
• Blue is the most popular tie colour
• Attendee hair colour:  0.5% ginger, 40% black, 7% grey, 37% brunette/brown 10% Blonde, 6% N/A
• 15% are women (this rises to 20% in Hall 7)
• 75% of people have more than one mobile but alarmingly 2% left theirs at home!
• 45% of people look tired (on the Wednesday)
• 60% of people had water for lunch, 5% alcohol, 30% fruit juice, 40% coffee
• 92% of people were shorter than 6ft

[Via: Mobile Marketing Magazine]

Remember a few days back I mentioned about gaming, and how it should be advancing due to things like hardware acceleration?

Well there is a nice short video on the BBC News website, which features a mini-interview with a spokesman from Imagination Technologies - one of the companies involved in this next generation of boosting performance for things like games.

Check out that video here, you will see some familiar devices, and though the camerwork is slightly shaky in places, some interesting demos of how games are advancing on the mobile platform

[Via: BBC News]

No sooner have we crossed the mid-point of February (highlighted nicely with Valentine’s Day!), than a story about Xmas 08 appears - stop the madness! Where will it all end!?

Anyway, this story is about the battlelines being drawn up for Christmas as regards what the “hero” devices might be - in the Prepay segment (i.e. those which often sell in supermarkets).

Apparently, supermarket chains have been out at MWC, and industry experts are saying that the traditional Mobile sales pandemonium this year will be led by 5MP camera devices (such as the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95 above), in a £80-100 tier.
This would mean an extremely interesting period before Xmas, where both retailers and device vendors are scrabbling to up their numbers for Q4 - of course, what will be the prepay handsets are actually already in circulation, since they drip down from being “new postpay” to “cheap prepay” over the course of the year.

As you might expect, big players will be Nokia, SE, Samsung and LG - all with established devices in circulation - this shouldn’t rule out new devices coming on to the market though!

Last year in the MNOs, it was Orange who dived deepest, with 000,000’s of LG handsets in an super-cheap £10-20 tier. In the supermarkets, obviously bitter rivals Sainsbury’s and Tesco were major players - and this year you can be sure both these chains had buyers at MWC, making the deals for Xmas.

Of course, lest we not forget the other major forces in UK retail - Argos (a UK chain, where you buy from a catalogue in store and then the products are delivered via conveyor belt to you from a store room upstairs!) is a pivotal retailer as far as some vendors are concerned - judging by how full my local Argos was last Xmas, I would certainly not disagree!

So, it will be interesting to see how the retail landscape for Mobile devices plays out this year - and whether those 5MP prepay devices will be the difference-maker!

[Via: Mobile Today]

Following on from my post yesterday about the best 3D handsets, I’ve come across this absolute nugget of a story, which is also a remnant from MWC.

Imagination Techologies had a stand at MWC which compared the N81 (without dedicated 3D hardware) and the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95 (which does have) - so this was the N81 running graphics off it’s CPU, versus the N95 with the “turbo” provided by a dedicated chip. Luckily someone captured a video of it here.

It’s possible to see from the video that there is 50-60x acceleration achieved by dedicated HW acceleration - an argument backed up by nVidia, who I reported on yesterday also (check that out here).

Personally I can’t wait for the time when (a) this technology becomes standard and (b) vendors start to make real use of it - Nokia’s S60 Touch interface might be the first where we really see that happening…..

[Via: Pocketgamer.co.uk]

Ericsson have launched the “Ericsson Multimedia Communication Suite (MCS)”, with the goal of integrating web 2.0 content feeds in to the UI. The UI will be making an appearance on select devices, such as the SE W760i

End users will have access to new services from existing applications - so for example, knowing presence information about friends through the contat listing in their address book.

The research completed by Ericsson prior to product launch, showed that there is strong demand for the mobilisation of communication services on the internet - for example chat, sending files and presence.

The intuitive user interface integrates new MCS applications such as chat and file transfer smoothly with existing voice, video call, SMS and MMS services. In addition, hanging features such as presence off the address book enables a connected device experience.

Ericsson MCS will initially be available for selected Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) feature phones. The MCS is built on IMS architecture, and has been developed with the Rich Communication Suite (RCS) in mind - this aims for broad industry interoperability and acceptance by utilizing standardized IMS service features.

Comment: Obviously this is a platform enabler, which is going to begin to find i’s way in to devices to give the connected experience - and for that it should be commended. Further RCS-compliant solutions will no doubt add features and services, however, Ericsson is likely to see significant first-mover advantage here.

[Via: 3G.co.uk]

So Mobile World Congress (MWC) is all done now, and for me personally it was a hectic period - probably too hectic, on reflection. Lots of deals were done, alcohol consumed - oh, and there were some Mobile devices and services there too. Below are just a couple of offbeat observations from the show:

1. People are still calling it 3GSM rather than MWC - the show has changed quite a bit in the last few years, and this is one of the significant changes - however I can’t help think that 3GSM has a better tagline to it - it’s a bit like “CES” or “CeBIT” - everyone in the industry instantly knows to which show you are referring. Maybe with time MWC will catch on…. or not.
2. Location, Location, Location - anyone whose wife/partner makes them watch property shows will know that the only thing that is important about buying a house is it’s location - likewise I think for MWC. It’s moved from Cannes to Barcelona in recent years, and from what feedback I heard, there’s just as much posititve as negative comment on this. What was interesting though is that there are whispers about it moving to Madrid next year….!
3. Comedy taglines on stands - this year, there were a huge number of amusing “marketized” statements from Companies on their stands and suchlike - you can see a bunch of them here. My personal favourite though was LG’s, which read: “Smartly Intelligent”…! I don’t even want to get in to the abuse of grammar and context here, but if you were to say that smart and intelligent are oft-regarded as having similar meaning in everyday conversation, then you could approximate that statement to “Intelligently intelligent” - which clearly is the opposite of “Stupidly Stupid”

Ben

Zi Corporation, a leading provider of intelligent interface solutions, recently announced the introduction of QixLinks and QixLinks Ads, two radical new developments of its on-device search and discovery engine Qix. These products will offer users direct access to portal content and advertisements, driving greater ARPU for operators.

QixLinks and QixLinks Ads are targeted to deliver the top 1,000 high-value mobile content and advertising keywords to users. Qix offers the ability to showcase select operator content and hand-off to standard mobile search vendors for accessing other content. QixLinks enables discovery and repeated use by including natural language words a user might think to enter to find content.

During the 3GSM, Zi Corporation also introduced the new version of Qix for Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile powered devices.

During a demo ride at the 3GSM show, MobileBurn had a chance to see the new Nokia 6110 Navigator in action on the streets of Barcelona.

According to them, due the lack of a large touch screen, the 6110 Navigator will probably never be as easy to use as a dedicated GPS navigation system. However, being able to get full featured navigation from a phone that you already own is sure to win some converts over to Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s way of looking at things… You can read the full story from here.

At the 3GSM Symbian Press/Wiley showcased its new title - “S60 Programming: A Tutorial Guide”. The book is co-authored by Reuben Edwards, senior lecturer in mobile applications and a Forum Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Champion, and Reuben Edwards, lecturer in games and m-commerce who has been at the forefront of innovative mobile multimedia application development for over ten years.

Authors argue that the new book will prove to be an invaluable aid to academic and professional programmers alike who want to learn S60 and wish to quickly attain a level of competence where they can develop their own applications for the commercial market.

More information is available from here.

Yet another Linux platform. This one is developed by Qtopia. Their Greenphone recently went on sale, but only for the interested developers. What will happen with this platform - it’s hard to tell at the moment. One thing is certain - at the end, we’ll have no more than 2-3 mainstream Linux platforms. In the meantime, enjoy the short hands-on Greenphone video.