February is the time of year when the world’s mobile industry decamps to Catalonia for the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. There is usually no lack of nifty systems to tempt firms, and this year was no different.
Symbian made its usual announcements showing continued healthy growth. 22.4 million Symbian phones were shipped in the last quarter of 2007 compared with 14.6 million a year before. There were four new Symbian models from Nokia, two from Sony Ericsson and one each from LG Electronics and Samsung. Surprisingly, Sony Ericsson also announced its first mobile based on the Windows Mobile platform. The device is called the Xperia X1 and has a large touch-sensitive display and a slide-out qwerty keyboard.
Also on the topic of mobile operating systems, the mobile Linux community got together about a year ago to form the LiMo Foundation. This body has over 30 members and aims to create an open-source mobile OS based on Linux. They seem to have been successful because LG Electronics, Motorola, NEC, Panasonic and Samsung all showed LiMo handsets.
As ever, there is a thirst for extra bandwidth for mobile data services. We already have High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) being rolled out, but the next step is a little more vague and called Long-Term Evolution (LTE). Nokia Siemens Networks announced a new base station that can be upgraded by software to handle LTE when it is fully defined. The steady increase in data rates is putting a strain on the core networks of mobile operators and it’s a shoo-in that there will have to be significant upgrades in the future.
The idea of femtocells for in-building extension of mobile networks continues to attract a lot of interest. British chip design company, picoChip, announced a partnership with Continuous Computing to provide a complete reference design for 3G femtocells including HSPA. The forecast growth for femtocells is very high, with many millions of units expected to be shipped in the next few years.
There is so much new mobile software available that it is difficult to pick out those applications likely to appeal to corporates. However, in my view the MobileKeeper suite from Portuguese company MobiComp is impressive. Like many others, the software can backup all the data on a mobile and make it available via a secure web site but it also has a set of functions that come into play if the device is stolen. The mobile can be wiped clean of sensitive data and locked; it can also be programmed to emit a loud shriek alerting others and rendering the device unusable. In addition, if the device has a camera, pictures can be captured enabling investigators to narrow down the location of the thief.
The continued success of the MWC indicates that the mobile business is continuing to develop and not just becoming a utility as had been predicted.
