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.