Back from Mobile World Congress

Thomas Husson | February 14, 2008, 03:49 AM

It is difficult to wrap up so many news but I tried to step back a little from the flow of information when flying back from Barcelona. After the 2007 takeaways, here below is my vision of the 2008 mobile mecca pilgrimage.

MWC is and will continue to be a technology show. The hottest tech topic this year was LTE versus Wimax. Lots of vendors form software and platform solutions are in Barcelona to demonstrate their innovative or carrier-grade solutions. Despite the mobile entertainment hall and the presence of Robert Redford, Isabella Rossellini and of many consumer brands, this is not likely to change. There are a couple of reasons for that: this is a fair trade congress not a consumer show, innovation is mainly led by technlogies and operators are still and for some time at the heart of the value chain.

Some very cool devices announced for next Autumn. Difficult to avoid the Samsung SOUL : HSDPA 7.2Mbps, 5MP, slim and the "completion" or even the "spirit" of the Ultra edition with a massive flagship campaign. Many other devices were announced since Samsung will invest significantly this year to increase its market share and n2 position (objective of 200M sales in 2008 versus 161M in 2007), maintaining its strong position in stylish and high-end devices but willing to expand in other categories (basic phones, infotainment, multimedia,...), geographical regions and form factors (bartypes).

Lots of discussions around the Xperia X1 device from Sony Ericsson based on Windows mobile. Many jumped into the conclusions that it reflected difficulties at Symbian. To my knowledge, SE is still a key shakeholder in Symbian (77M Symbian smartphones sold in 2007 alone, a 50% increase yoy by the way!) and the X1 is only one device. More importantly is the launch of the Xperia sub-brand itself alongside new devices launched in the Cyber-shot sub-brand (C702/ 902), Walkman sub-brand (W980, HSDPA, 8GB memory) or devices with a touchscreen interface (G700 / G900).

Motorola Z10 and E8 look also very promising and will be launched soon in Europe. LG KF600 and 700 as well.

I expected to see more HSUPA phones (not dongles) but none of the major handset manufacturers introduced one. Few prototypes of devices based on Android by the way, at least not presented by major handset manufacturers.

Nokia's competitors are all insisting they are not service companies and that they want to be partners for operators. It obviously did not prevent the market leader to announce amazing results (50M N-Series sold since launch among which 7M N95) and new devices: a new flagship device N96 (16GB, DVB-H, HSDPA, WiFi, 5MP,...!!!!), the N78, the Nokia 6210 Navigator (an optimized version of the GPS 6110 launched in 2007) or the 6220 Classic. However, it is clear that Nokia, as a market leader and in line with its new service strategy, insisted on its music, games and navigation services with the launch of Nokia MAPS 2.0.

I had a demo of Share on Ovi, the community service based on Twango. Pretty cool but it still is difficult to me to figure out how services will be intergrated under OVI from a brand perspective. Everybody at the show was referring to it, but I am sorry to say that beyond our small world, this brand does not exist at all in consumers' mind and still need to be created from scratch. This is a major challenge when you know the strength of the Nokia brand. One that will be tackled later in 2008...

Orange (very discreet presence this year, the company let its main booth to Chinese ZTE) has announced a MOU with Nokia but the company will launch its to-be-launched converged music store under its own brand! This agreement thus differ from those of Telefonica and Vodafone, who may still perceive Nokia as a threat but who have no interest in going against their main supplier nascent efforts.

The other key issue was the partnerships with Internet players. Nokia announced an agreement on new high-end devices with Google (they have other agreements with Yahoo!, Windows Live and local search providers) while T-Mobile dropped Google and finally ended the long-lasting industry rumor by selecting Yahoo! search solution. In the search space, Medio and Surfkitchen partnership is also an interesting deal while Jumptap was selected by TeliaSonera.

There were also a bunch of innovative services around mobile social networking sites and location-based services, not to mention Yahoo One Connect, which is an attempt to make the most of the social adress book. This inevitably led to discussions on the potential of mobile advertising. There were a couple of articles especially in the Financial Times or in the Wall Street Journal. Jupiter Research recently published a report about this topic forecasting Mobile Internet advertising (exclusively search and display net revenues) to reach 1.3 billion euros in Western Europe by 2012. The co-operation between UK operators in the most advanced digital ad European market is a very positive sign but I agree with my colleague Nate Elliott, that it will not have a significant impact in 2008/2009.

If you are a member of the press or a client willing to discuss recent announcements, please contact respectively PRESSEUROPE (at) JUPITERRESEARCH (DOT) COM or your client service manager.