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!"
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