Much has been written about announcements at the event, unfortunately little has been written about the incredible developments at Powermat - who not content with providing wireless charging for mobile phones and other consumer electronics, are also diversifying into wireless power for martini glasses. Yes, a martini glass that lights up when you place it on the right spot on your bar. How did we ever live without it? The next evolution is certain to be the self chilling beer glass - pour a warm beer into the glass, place it on the mat, wait 15 minutes - voila - chilled beer. A new technology revolution for brewers.
Traditionally phone manufacturers use MWC announce their key new phone lineups for 2010 - with three exceptions (Nokia, Blackberry and Apple) this year was the same. It is interesting to look at positioning statements from manufacturers, and understand how this helps them dominate categories.
Apple
Apple have set the standard that everyone else is following at Mobile World Congress. Touch was everywhere - as were applications. Why? Apple have, and continue to utterly dominate the mobile world in two categories - Internet, and Applications. Their web browser is undoubtedly the best in the world on a mobile device, and their Application store has a richer choice of applications, and remarkably few poor quality applications - maybe a result of their approval process?
Blackberry
RIM continue to dominate in email devices. Mobile World Congress is a fascinating event - I saw more people carrying two phones, iPhone and Blackberry than I did anywhere else. Clearly Blackberry's offer of reliable messaging and voice, coupled with Apple's excellence in Web and Applications is a killer combination for rich business people. As anyone who has used an iPhone as an integrated device for music, web, applications and email will know the iPhone balks at going more than 8 hours away from a power socket. This is a weakness that Blackberry can continue to exploit - and with a pending webkit based browser it will be interesting to see how many people they can wrest away from iPhone adoration.
Nokia
The elephant in the room for any mobile event is Nokia. They remain the worlds number 1 handset manufacturer by volume of shipments - both in overall volumes, and also in the high margin smartphone category. Any consumer facing service will see that the majority of their users are on Nokia phones. In it's core market of building high quality, reliable phones at low cost Nokia remains the master. The lack of any category defining phone however means that there is little to write about. It is interesting that Nokia chose not to announce new phone lineups at MWC - preferring to focus their marketing efforts on the Ovi store instead. I look forward to seeing what Nokia can come up with during the rest of 2010.
Sony Ericsson
Once the people who defined, and won the category of "Camera phone" with the Cybershot series, and "Music phone" with the Walkman series, Sony Ericsson continue to lack focus on a category defining winner in the mobile phone space - their headline announcements were around the X10, a small Android phone. Tough positioning in the Android phone space - with in total 48 different Android phones on show at Mobile World Congress there is clearly a large number of bets on Android as a way to beat Nokia - none quite answer the question for me "what is an Android phone best in the world at?"
Samsung
Samsung are the world number 1 in many of the markets where they choose to operate - from flash memory, televisions and other consumer electronics they have the ambition to get to number 1. In the mobile phone market they number 2, and still quite a long way behind Nokia. The key announcement at MWC was the Samsung Wave - the first Bada phone. This is a phone that is aimed at Samsung's core market - feature phones, those devices that people who are unwilling to pay for smartphones carry around. There are a lot of these - even the most aggressive forecasts for smartphone use in western europe show growth to only 50% of the market by 2012. Samsung's investment in Bada, and the release of the Wave shift the capabilities of traditional smartphones to the feature phone category. While their success in this area will be seen as bad by developers as they continue to fragment the mobile platform market, for Samsung I predict great success. By focussing on a core market, and bringing all their efforts to bear on a single proprietary platform the are able to differentiate from others and excel - creating category defining products. I believe the focus the Koreans are showing gives them the best chance of toppling Nokia from it's number 1 position by 2012 - but as the Finns are playing their cards close to their chest right now, it's far from certain.
LG
The most surprising announcement I saw at MWC was the announcement by LG that they would be working with Intel and Nokia on the MeeGo platform (the platform that Nokia use in the N900 device) I will be interested to see how this develops - but for any partner competing with Nokia on the same platform as Nokia life has proven difficult in the past - experiences from Symbian prove this as Nokia has been able to use it's scale to produce more devices, with more features at lower price points and faster than any competitor.
HTC
HTC continue to show innovation in their lineup - and their early bets on Microsoft and Android are paying off - as Microsoft begin a renewed push behind Windows Phone 7 and HTC apply their engineering skils to the devices for this platform I expect to see more growth in smartphone sales from HTC.
Motorola
Motorola continue to be almost invisible in Europe - and having made a big bet on Android are likely to continue to be a minor player unless they can come up with a category defining device.
Coming out of the event I'm most impressed by Samsung, and with HTC, and with Google - who are agressively going after developer mind share with the Nexus One (they gave away Nexus One devices to developers at MWC - reportedly giving away $750,000 worth of devices) - this implies they are positioning the Nexus One as the "Developer's phone" - whether this translates into compelling applications that will drive consumer demand we'll wait and see - in the past on the desktop it has (Microsoft created their leading position in the desktop OS space by partnering effectively with developers). Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to get my free Nexus One - you know where I am Google if you've got some spare.
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