Back from Barcelona where I attended the GSMA Mobile World Congress -- the annual confab for everything cell-phone related. What a great place to have a conference and exhibition. Barcelona is my second most favorite city in the world, second only to Paris. In a lot of ways it is much like Paris; great culture, unique architecture, fabulous food and wonderful people. Ok, maybe that last one I’ll give to Barcelona.

As expected, everyone was present and accounted for at GSMA. Well, everyone except Apple and Nokia. I didn’t expect Apple to be there, but Nokia? What’s up with that?

But, everyone else was certainly there. Here’s some of the coolest phones I saw: Sony Ericsson showed their Xperia™ X10 smartphone. It was really nice and certainly rivals the iPhone in look and feel. The user interface was extremely slick with floating images and pictures, definitely a cut above the current Apple offering. Samsung showed a new AMOLED touch screen that is awesome. It was very bright and easy to see in all lighting conditions; something that is a bit lacking with the iPhone. Samsung’s Bada platform for application development was, indeed, bad – as in very cool! There were a number of independent application developers there all showing their products on the new Samsung Wave smartphone. Transitioning between apps was extremely smooth and seamless. While the applications themselves may be unique, the usability and user interface was consistent across all of them. There’s also on-the-fly editing of widgets which was pretty neat.

HTC had a huge presence. This is the company that used to make phones for others to brand. Now, they are branding their own phones. When you look across their lineup, you can recognize who they may have designed phones for in the past. For years, they have focused on hardware because that’s what they were paid to do. Now they need to catch up on the software side and the user experience, if they want to be a player.

Motorola was all about their Blur environment. They had some good phones, but they were really pushing their Blur technology, i.e. cloud computing. Blur is an environment that organizes all the social media sites you may belong to: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. as well as all the contacts from across all your various email and contact programs. Let me stress -- ALL. It seems that when you buy a Motorola phone like the Cliq and start it up, it prompts you to open a Blur account. When you do, it will search everything and create contact info for anyone you know, whether you like it or not. Apparently, there’s no way to be selective about who you want be in contact with. Again, this is across all social sites as well as your email accounts. (Sounds like an oops to me.) All of this information is stored on their servers at their sites (in the "Cloud"). Not that I have anything to hide or that I’m paranoid, but this just seems a little exposed to me. However, I got the distinct feeling that they were really targeting a different demographic to which I don’t belong, one which doesn’t really think about things like privacy or government "oversight." Like the sub-30 crowd?

One notable bright spot and I can’t believe I’m saying this, was Microsoft and their Windows Phone 7 OS demonstration. WOW! Very impressive. With this OS, you can actually turn your smartphone into a virtual laptop, including full-throttle Windows Office applications. They definitely upped the ante with this one. Windows Mobile is now just a bad memory.

For me, the biggest takeaway from this year’s GSMA was that the hardware is becoming homogenized. Most handset manufacturers have moved toward the iPhone style form factor. Sure, some might have square corners verses rounded corners but when you do a little measuring they are all mostly the same: about the same physical dimensions, a button at the center on the bottom, a touch screen, swooshing to navigate. Really, it would be very difficult to tell which phone came from which company. The differentiation is going to be ultimately in the software; the kind of apps offered and how intuitive the user interface is. I think Google may have figured this out before anyone else did. And by the way, Android-based phones were everywhere.

The PC industry went down this very same path. Early on, you could tell an IBM PC from a Compaq PC pretty easily. But after a few years, ok maybe a decade, all PCs looked pretty much the same (not talking about Apple). It was very difficult for the PC manufacturers to differentiate themselves based on the hardware. I see the same thing happening to the cell phone market. It will basically come down to what kind of processing power you have, battery life and the user experience the service providers want to sell you. Form factor will be less of an issue. Smartphones will all have touch screens and they are all moving to the largest LCD form factor that fits in your pocket. Granted, the feature phone and low-end phones have a little more variations in form factor than the smartphone, but smartphones are the fastest growing segment. And based on what I heard from industry executives at GSMA, I’m pretty sure that the smartphone feature set as we see it today will certainly migrate to the midrange and will eventually become standard at the lower end of the market. This will leave the upper end to innovate with cool new features mostly based on application innovation.

So we’re back to, "It’s the software, stupid!"

Just back from CES in Las Vegas and it was like old times compared to last year. The place was packed. You got a sense that people were anxious to shrug off the malaise of the last two years and get on with the new 2010 and a new decade. "Hope springs eternal."

Most of the major companies pulled out all the stops: Samsung, Panasonic, Microsoft, Sony, LG, Motorola and even Polaroid! (I thought they were out of business, but more about them later). There were three major themes for the show: Tablets, eReaders, and 3D TV. The one with the most WOW factor was 3D TV. It was everywhere. If there was any way an exhibitor could tie to 3D TV, they did. While most of the TV vendors were also touting other innovations like 240Hz frame rate technology and ultra thin LED backlit panels, everything was overshadowed by 3D. And I must say I was more than skeptical that 3D could rival what you see in a modern digital theatre featuring a 3D movie, but everything I saw was fantastic! Yes, you had to wear the glasses, but some of the vendors made them look like hip European eyewear so you didn’t look too goofy. Frankly, I thought having to wear glasses would be a real put-off, but I don’t think it will be a big deal for the consumer if the glasses are cheap enough, which may pose a bit of a challenge. Every vendor that I visited used the active glasses as opposed to the very cheap plastic polarizing kind found in theatres, known as passive technology. The active kind uses a shutter technology that synchs with the TV to trick the viewers’ mind into seeing 3D. They are heavier and a bit bulkier than the passive kind and have an on/off button which means there is a small battery somewhere. All of this signals high cost to me. When I mentioned this to one vendor, he said they were not expensive at all, "less than $50!" Passive glasses are just a few dollars, if that. All I can say is that if the TV industry wants the consumer to adopt 3D TV as the next biggest thing and use the active glasses, they better figure out a way to reduce or hide the cost of them. Can you imagine walking across a dark living room and hearing a crunch under your foot or how about your two-year old deciding to see how far the ear pieces will spread apart! I also overheard a few people complaining that watching 3D with the active glasses gives them a headache. So it sounds like there are a few things that still need to be worked out.

It will be a long time, many years and perhaps a decade, before 3D broadcasting will be as common as broadcasting in color, if ever. I mean, the broadcasters just made a huge investment to switch to HD. I just can’t see them making another big outlay of cash for new equipment for some time to come. However, most TVs will come with built-in dual mode where certain programs will be in 3D and most others will be in standard mode and the TV set will just switch between them automatically. Most likely the 3D content will be reserved for special types of shows or events like sports or the "3D Movie of the Week." I’m guessing that the bulk of 3D content will be provided by the cable/satellite companies. Discovery and Disney say that they are already preparing a 3D cable channel. It will be very interesting to see how it all evolves.

The show floor was packed on the days I walked around. It was in a lot of ways a typical trade show. To attract attention, Polaroid hired Lady GaGa to do nothing but sit and stand on a stage while hundreds of camera flashes went off and just as many cell phones waved in the air trying to capture the event. You couldn’t get within spitting distance of the booth. Other exhibitors had mini-stage shows with attractive spokespersons and all kinds of "trinkets n’ trash". It was really difficult getting up close to the products and try them out.

On the mobile front, the big elephant wasn’t there. No, I’m not talking about Nokia. I’m talking about Apple. They were conspicuous by their absence, leaving the electronics orgy to others while they wait for the calm after the storm to introduce their rumored tablet. Others chose to introduce their tablet offering and quite frankly, after a while, they all started to blur. I really didn’t see anything that had a big WOW factor other than touch screens replacing the need for a stylist. eReaders were everywhere causing me to wonder where that market will go versus the tablet. Supposedly, the tablet could double as a reader and will support full color which is much more attractive to magazine type of content. But if I can download a book to my tablet, why would I need an eReader? If I have an eReader, I’ll still need a laptop or a tablet which makes the eReader redundant. So on the surface, eReaders are an interim step. I don’t see a huge market and if the tablet takes off, the eReader market will be even smaller. I, for one, don’t want to carry multiple devices if I don’t have to. I have a tendency to either break them or loose them so less is better.

Most of the cell phone manufacturers were at CES, but frankly I didn’t see a whole lot of innovation. Pretty much same old stuff. I’m betting they are all waiting to do their announcements at the Mobile World Congress (GSMA) in Barcelona next month. (SPMT will be exhibiting there as well.)

One of the more interesting exhibitors at CES was Ford. They were touting their connected car. They announced MyFordTouch which is supposed to replace conventional buttons, gauges and knobs with voice commands. There were built in LCD panels with slide bars to adjust various functions in the car. The main LCD panel in the center was a touch screen that allows you to control just about all the creature comforts of the car. There is a media hub that has an SD slot, RCA jacks, a MP3 jack and a USB port potentially turning your car into a mobile hot spot. Talk about a distracted driver!

One of the trends I’ve blogged about in the past is the merging of mobile media devices with the cell phone. I predicted that in the future you will carry a single device that acts as your laptop, cell phone, music and video player. I’m not talking about the netbooks or tablets as they are defined today. It was pretty evident at CES 2010 that that trend is accelerating. There will be some shake out for sure. Some devices, perhaps the eReader, will have a pop in popularity, but will fade over time. MP3 players as a standalone device are already fading. The laptop will become your desktop and something else will take its place; maybe a tablet, but who knows. Let’s see what Apple struts out in the next few weeks. As is their custom, they could very well set the stage for the future of tablets and turn the industry on its ear causing most of the current vendors to go back to the drawing board. We shall see.

I guess I’m a member of the “old school” when it comes to storing personal data in “The Cloud.” This cloud thing has been around since the 1990’s first fostered by Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems. I scoffed at the idea then because I couldn’t imagine anyone storing personal information on some remote server in a cavernous warehouse in some god- knows-where location. What would happen if something went wrong with the server or the database program? What would happen if someone hacked into the server and stole the information? It was just too risky for me; not that I have anything that anyone would want to steal. To this day, I still can’t get my head wrapped around the notion of storing anything in the Cloud with the notable exception of my Yahoo! mail which I don’t have a choice. Why would I want to pay a monthly fee to store anything in the Cloud when you can buy a terabyte of storage for about $100. A TERABYTE! You could buy two and have one back up the other.

But it looks like using the Cloud for storing data is going to be the norm with the proliferation of new memory hogging applications designed for smartphones and netbooks whether I like it or not. The recent disaster with the Sidekick from T-Mobile seemed to vindicate my outmoded stance. Something happened to the server or the database software that was storing and managing information for about a million T-Mobile customers who pay a monthly fee for the service. The server either crashed or the database got corrupted or both and there was no backup. Those poor people lost everything, notes, pictures, e-mails, calendar info, contact lists, everything. Gone. Kaput. They were told it was unrecoverable. A few days later, thankfully, T-Mobile said “most” of the data was retrieved. But still. I would be hard pressed to trust the system again. You would expect the service provider to have redundancies in place to protect the data. I guess they didn’t.

As new mobile devices come to market that have much more capability and many more data intensive applications, the need for storage is only going to accelerate. While onboard storage is getting denser and cheaper, it will not keep pace with these memories hungry applications. There is even talk of having HD video recording and playback on these future devices. It’s inevitable that having a spot in the Cloud for the data you create will become a necessity. Let’s hope this incident with the Sidekick will spur the service providers on to develop systems that are failsafe.

I’ve been reading articles recently about the demise of Nokia as a world leader in cell phones. I know the psychology is to pile on the big guy when they are tilting to one side and try to push them to the ground. There is some sort of primal satisfaction in bringing the big animal down.  But, I’ve dealt with Nokia mano-a-mano and they will not, by any means, relinquish their dominance in the market. Whereas the once mighty Motorola (the inventor of the cell phone!) stumbled from first to fifth place in the market by, some would say, largely because of inept management, you cannot say the same for Nokia. There are incredibly smart and able people in that company from top to bottom. They are and will continue to be a major force in defining the industry’s future. For anyone to even think that Nokia is “toast,” as one reporter suggested, is ludicrous. I’m no great defender of Nokia and they certainly don’t need me to stand up for them. They can be quite a challenge to work with but are the 800-pound gorilla. I’ve seen them push the entire industry to expend enormous resources to explore potential technologies that might never see the light of day. They drive the cell phone supplier industry with seemingly impossible requirements that ultimately pushes striking innovation. Nokia knows very well that the cell phone, as we know it today, will be nothing like the device we will see in the coming few years. They are out there trying to figure out what will stick with the consumer. So they came out with an ugly, clunky, overpriced, me-too netbook. So what! You can do all the market research or focus groups you want, but until you put something in consumers’ hands, you aren’t really going to know what the right product is. We have recently seen major, too-big-to-fail, world-leading companies crash and burn, particularly in the financial and automotive segments. So big companies do, indeed, go under proving that any company is at risk. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the report of Nokia’s demise is greatly exaggerated.

I live in San Francisco and travel to Sunnyvale, California to the office pretty much every day that I’m not on an airplane. It’s about a 50-mile drive. Last Friday, I got to the office and opened the trunk of my car as usual to get my laptop bag, but it wasn’t there. A cold sweat of panic washed over me thinking that I must have left it on top of the car and drove off with it tumbling down the back hitting the ground only to be pounced on by the street people and never to be seen again. While doing a mental inventory of my laptop bag contents, I made a call to the nanny back at the house and it turns out I had left it sitting inside by the front door. Apparently, I just walked right past it on the way out. I had a choice to either go back to SF to get my laptop or forge ahead with nothing but my smartphone in hand. I decided this would be a good time to experiment. Plus, having a number of meetings lined up that morning there just wasn’t time to “run” back home and get the laptop. So, I decided to see how far I could go in the day’s business with just the smartphone. I had already gotten away from the habit of dragging my laptop to most meetings and just use the smartphone to take notes, check email, work my calendar and, of course, Google. But still, it felt a bit silly/strange to be sitting at my desk with a dark monitor and an empty laptop docking station with only my phone in hand pecking away madly on email.

I made it to just past noon. I got stuck when I couldn’t access the company’s internal systems from my smartphone. The experiment was interesting from three aspects: I didn’t have access to my stored laptop data which made me feel a little uncomfortable (you just never know when you need to refer to an archived email or file); the thumb typing slowed me way down; and if I wanted to work on a spreadsheet, presentation, or write my next blog, I couldn’t because the apps I use don’t run in my smartphone OS environment.

These problems are certainly solvable by cloud computing provided you have a good connection, but that isn’t always a given. Google Apps can replace the installed-on-the-hard drive office productivity applications. On-board storage is getting cheaper and cheaper and soon you’ll be able to get tens of gigabytes of flash storage for your smartphone for relatively cheap. Storing your data in the cloud is also becoming more commonplace. The only issue that has me a bit bugged is the user interface. Typing with thumbs will just never be as fast as 10-finger typing. However, I’m sure there will be a docking station similar to what the iPhone uses for music that will enable you to plug your smartphone into a corporate or home network with attached keyboard and monitor and you’re good to go. But getting and remaining connected will be the Achilles heel. I just got off an American Airlines flight to LA and was able to get on the Internet with their new in-flight connection service and work my email and send text messages. It was great until we hit 10,000 feet on descent and it unceremoniously cut me off.

We’re getting there.

Today an abridged version of the SPMT specification became available to anyone who wants it, albeit under NDA. Most people don’t realize how much progress has been made on the SPMT specification. When we announced the formation of the consortium back in May, everyone just assumed that the development of the specification had just begun. The fact is, the spec has been in development for several years. I guess you could say we were in stealth mode.  Having the abridged SPMT specification available will give everyone a good sense of how far along the specification has evolved.  If you would like to see the entire specification, then you need to become a member of the consortium. That can be done by going to www.SPMT.org and clicking on “Become a Member”. Admittedly a lot of the interesting information has been omitted from the abridged version but it is easy to get an understanding of this new technology and, perhaps, move you to become a member. This is truly exciting technology and promises to foster a whole new generation of mobile devices.

I lived through the first wave of commercially available cell phones that were deployed way back in the olden days, circa 1980’s. I knew then that the world was in for a big change. Even though people were carrying around these big bricks that looked more like a World War II walkie-talkie than a cell phone as we know them today, technology being what it is, I knew they eventually would get smaller. Evolution went slowly  back then, it took almost 10 years before Motorola brought out the revolutionary StarTac; the first clamshell style cell phone. But, I still remember the thrill of picking up one of the first Motorola brick models, standing outside, pressing the on button and hearing a dial tone. It was amazing. I have that same feeling right now about the direction of the next generation of handsets. The functionality and services that will be developed for these new gizmos is and will be just incredible. These are exciting times!

I’m sure everyone has seen recent press about Nokia coming out with a netbook powered by an Intel CPU. The movement toward a mobile device that does everything a laptop does and also makes a phone call is moving rapidly into reality. You have the largest supplier of CPUs to the PC market hooking up with the largest supplier of handset and the writing is certainly on the wall. I mentioned in previous posts about the future mobile media devices that will be coming into the market in the 2012/14 timeframe and this is the very first step. The Nokia netbook’s OS is Window’s based. Given the CPU supplier this shouldn’t be a surprise. But, given Nokia’s investment both financially and emotionally to Symbian, this seems a bit odd. On top of all the historical issues with anything driven by a Windows OS, this seems to be a strange decision. Yes, I know, software is king and legacy apps are what everyone worries about. But, there are hundreds of Web 2.0 productivity apps that don’t require Windows OS. Think Google Docs. I constantly fight with my PC laptop every day trying to get it to behave like I want it to. It’s a nightmare that I’ve lived for 20 years. (I know I could move to MAC but that’s just not been the corporate culture.)

There is hope, however. There will be ARM-based netbooks that can take full advantage of the Linux OS.  And, since ARM CPUs are in just about every cell phone on the planet, this seem like a much smoother integration path. It's going to be fun to watch how all this shakes out.

As mentioned in a previous posting, I've been spending this week in Cambridge England  attending the ARM Partner Meeting event. It's been just a great experience. Kind of like a family reunion: you see all the people you want to see and some you don't. But, all the whose-who in the mobile space are here. It's a great way to connect with partners and customers in a very concentrated way.

Speaking of being connected; you would think for a place celebrating the 800th (that's right 800th) anniversary of Cambridge University they would have figured out a way to get service providers to provide service for people needing to stay connected through their cell phones. The ARM event is taking place on the campus of St. John's College (part of the Cambridge University system) and the service there is deplorable. The only reliable place to get connected is outside standing in the middle of one of the massive lawns. Problem is, there are "Stay off the grass" signs everywhere. It's the same problem at Starbucks of all places. As long as you are by the front door near the street, you're fine. Sitting in the back of the store, you're in trouble. I don't think it's for a lack of cell towers.  I see them discretely place all around. It's really frustrating though. But, maybe it's just me. The good folks of Cambridge may not be as fixated in staying connected as us Yanks. Walking down Market Street in San Francisco everyone is either looking at their handset or has it up to their ear. Not so here. As a matter of fact, I haven't seen one person on a cell phone pass by the Starbucks in the last 15 minutes. Ok, maybe one but certainly not more than a couple.

And how about battery life!  Can't they get this figured out? I spend half my time on either my iPhone or laptop and the other half of the time searching for a place to plug them in. This is ridiculous. I suppose this is why there is such emphasis in the SPMT Technical Working Group to drive down power consumption while doubling the bandwidth.

Laptop is running out of juice.  Gotta post this or loose it.

Monday the 17th was another banner day for the Serial Port Memory Technology consortium. It was announced that ARM LTD is joining the consortium as a promoter. This is great news indeed. ARM owns the CPU IP market for the mobile space. You would be hard pressed to find a cell phone that does not have an ARM CPU core embedded in it at some level. I've been spending the last few days attending the ARM Partner Meeting in Cambridge England listening to ARM's executives outline the future for the company. Let me tell you, they are not letting up one bit. Since most of the material was presented under NDA I can't be specific but let me just say the future is bright not only for ARM but for those who want to design the next generation feature-rich mobile product.

We are looking forward to adding ARM's expertise in defining future SPMT specifications.  Their knowledge of both CPU architecture and system level design for the mobile space will be invaluable.

On another note: The SPMT Technical Working Group has been hard at work resolving the last bits of the SPMT specification.  The goal is to get the approved spec out by the end of the third quarter. Looks like they are on track to get it done.

Our own little world of mobile devices is changing rapidly. The thing we know today as a cell phone is morphing into a mobile media device that will be more closely aligned with a laptop than a cell phone by 2012. I was visiting a handset manufacturer recently and was talking about memory requirements for the future handset. Their requirement will be a minimum of 12GB/s by 2013/14. I asked why they needed such high bandwidth; what types of applications were they expecting to run on those devices? The person’s response was very simple. They are expecting to run anything a laptop runs today and then some. The consumer is already accustomed to being connected to their network of friends in real time. Their expectation is to have total application connectivity whenever they need/want it. Being able to carry the equivalent of a laptop in their pocked will be a requirement. I predict that the computer we carry from meeting to meeting, country to country, airplane to airplane today will stay home on our desks while the new mobile media device that, oh by the way, happens to make a phone call, will be what we rely to keep us productive while on the road, away from the office or away from home. I know there is the netbook craze mounting in the marketplace and it will certainly have its place. But we are already seeing the future of where cell phones are going with the wave of new Smartphones spurred on by the Apple iPhone. These devices will continue to become more complex and capable of executing media-rich applications like 1080p high-definition video.

The companies who make chips for these devices have to scramble to keep up with the requirements. A new class of high bandwidth memory chips is in the definition stage as I write this blog; employing an innovative serial interface capable of meeting the speed and low power demands of the future. Serial Port Memory Technology is the first such technology to get to the final specification stage. There are other technologies and techniques out there that are being investigated but right now, none really meet the requirement. Wide I/O TSV is the most talked about. Nokia and others have been pushing for further investigation to see if it will meet their power requirement. While it seems promising, other issues such as cost, manufacturability, potential reliability issues and scalability will most likely relegate it to a niche market at the ultra high end. It certainly won’t be a general purpose solution. Users already see the current LPDDR2 technology hitting the wall as far as bandwidth is concerned. So it pretty much leaves serial as the only viable way forward. The MIPI organization has been trying to push the MPHY as a serial DRAM interface solution. On the surface it seems to make sense. Having one PHY to populate the cell phone design including the DRAM is in the realm of nirvana. Only problem is that it won’t happen. Turns out, to make the MIPI MPHY work for DRAM you pretty much have to strip out most of the MPHY specification to the point where it is no longer a MPHY so you are back to at least two PHY technologies. Furthermore, the way the MIPI PHY technology is spec’d, all of the DRAM manufacturers are totally against it. It would be much too difficult and costly to implement. It was a nice thought, though.