Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is less than a week away, and there are still few hints of any radical game-changers on the floor. The 3G/4G conference in Spain has become as famous for spotting trends in broadband mobility as the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a month earlier. But this year, financial analysts seem more interested in tracking how a meltdown in Greece could cause collateral damage to the Euro, than in caring about how smart one’s phone is. Guess that makes sense.
The most interesting activity may come from the chip suppliers, and even they are following predictable trajectories. Qualcomm and Nvidia will be there to support the ARM Connected Community, while pointing out Snapdragon and Tegra differentiators; Broadcom will show Android support in its product line; Texas Instruments will let users play with OMAP3 and OMAP4 chip sets. A few surprise players will be around too, including Xilinx with two new Targeted Design Platforms for the 4G community, and Octasic with a new Opus2 DSP core for high-end turbo coding and Long-Term Evolution support.
Handset developers will continue with predictable “better iPhone than iPhone” behavior – LG and Samsung can boast of being the non-Apple smarties to beat, with HTC moving up on the outside. Samsung is rumored to be looking at a new AMOLED touch phone, while LG Display may be cooking prototypes of its own. Samsung also has a special touchscreen phone called Monte it plans to introduce for Europe and Latin America, while LG may show off the Snapdragon-based Arena Max. Palm, meanwhile, can parlay the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus as bids for low cost and good feature sets for browsing; Nokia will not attend, but will be hinting at its C5; while Motorola and Google will talk of applications for existing platforms (and Google, please don’t hint at a Nexus Two when the Nexus One is such a no-show).
Maybe the operators will be the ones to watch, as European specialists try to prove they won’t run into the late 2009 problems AT&T experienced with too much broadband data. If so, they can take a page from Sprint, who was given up for dead in mid-2009, only to be showing signs of new life as its WiMAX networks roll out. In any event, I’m relying on Gordon Kelly to show us something from Barcelona that might have a profound effect on the smartbook world. Nothing obvious is poking its head out from the snow at this point, but Barcelona’s warmer climes may see those green shoots emerge first.
Loring
