I spent my journey home from MWC this year reminiscing about the old days of 3GSM, when handset vendor innovation equalled upping megapixelage, and launching new products basically involved rehashing a former best seller but slightly updating the form factor, and blowing the R&D budget on expensive brand consultants to come up with a CRZY name!
Those days are gone my friends, and it was never more obvious than at MWC 2010. Nokia were conspicuous by their absence from hall 8, presumably hiding away in a hotel somewhere licking their wounds and plotting their revenge. Whilst Apple was expectedly absent, and therefore deliberately inconspicuous – save for the fact 80% of visitors these days have iPhones.
That latter fact was one Google seemed anxious to change, largely by handing out Nexus Ones like branded breath mints. Your correspondent sadly missed that particular boat, but he did manage to get some branded breath mints. Of course, keen to be seen as an earlier adopter, he was already a proud owner of Google’s first branded toy anyway, and has seen the benefits of outsourcing management of his social affairs to a 3rd party specialist first hand.
Adobe were keen to demo flash 10.1 running on the N1 (and various other devices), and it seems increasingly obvious that N1 owners are going to seize the Look at What My Phone Can Do That Yours Can’t bragging rights that iPhone owners have lovingly hogged for so long.
So this is what innovation looks like at MWC10: rather than presenting over equipped, over designed feature phones, incrementally more expensive and packing in more and more unwanted services, they now have to change your life, and do it more radically, and with more simplicity, elegance and ease of use than anything else out there.
So the challenges for the industry are now different – rather than fretting about ASP and ARPU, the concerns are things like STAYING IN BUSINESS, or avoiding becoming a data pipe for Google/Apple. But there’s more, the 3G networks are starting to look horribly inadequate for the purposes of delivering always on internet to everyone all the time, and LTE is still a spot on the horizon.
Furthermore, over the past few years smartphones have embarked on a borg-like assimilation of all consumer electronics products – digital cameras, calculators, MP3 players, sat nav, email/web surfing devices etc, etc. Eric Schmidt noted in his MWC keynote that smartphone sales will overtake desktop PC sales within 3 years. So the mobile phone revolution becomes the Everything Mobile revolution.
What was clear from MWC10 is that the march of the mobile handset has taken it far beyond the borders envisaged by the telecommunications industry, or even the PC industry – Bill Gates recently noted that Microsoft weren’t ambitious enough in their plans for Winmob.
Given all of that, one wonders whether the GSMA (given that it’s a group comprised of old guard Telco’s pushing vested interests) will be able to continue delivering a relevant convention to address this new converged Everything Mobile world. Or, like seemingly everything else in tech – will the action all relocate to San Francisco?
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