The conference
Wow, what can I say. It’s the first time I’ve been to the world’s largest mobile event and it stood up to the hype – it was huge! There was so much to see and do but here is what stuck out for ribot:
Sony Ericsson
The Xperia X1 phone – lovely use of materials: metals and glass, slide-out keyboard. Large touchscreen display and some interface elements that remind me of modern Apple interfaces. Surprisingly all on a Windows Mobile OS.
Generally impressed by the Sony Ericsson stand for their exploration of market niches – radio phones that look like radios, the inclusion of silent gestures, generally nice-looking and inspiring to see so many ideas.
Nokia
To be honest, I wasn’t impressed by the latest release of devices. Nearly all the devices have that current “boring” Nokia look. Yes, there are specific “style” ranges, but even these didn’t amaze me. Maybe this is due to the thought at the back of my mind that they all run either S60 or S40, both of which aren’t very pleasant to use due to terrible response times, general overcrowding and mish-mashing of interface elements and there’s also nothing new.
However, what I was impressed by was how much time Nokia had put into developing their software app teams, with the stand showcasing many new releases. Of particular interest was the new version of Nokia Maps 2.0 Beta (http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/maps). General look and feel was refreshing. I didn’t get a chance to have a play for very long, so I’ll be reviewing the app in-depth when we get our little package of new phones next week. 
Nokia S60 touchscreen unfortunately wasn’t very impressive – the device on display looked like an early prototype, using a very unresponsive version of the S60 interface (although I’m hoping this is due to the prototype nature of the product). It also didn’t feature haptic feedback which is something that I’d been wanting to test out for some time. techype goes into a lot more background detail regarding the potential pitfalls of the S60 touchscreen device.
Nvidia
The graphics-chipset company announced a new low-power graphics chip designed especially for mobile devices. They showcased the power and graphics capabilities on a prototype device built internally, allowing them to demonstrate future possibilities of small-screen user interfaces. The device ran on the Windows Mobile platform (6.1), supported OpenGL ES 2.0 and could potentially play a HDMI video for a full 10 hours!
taptu
A new form of mobile search. I’d heard the name being bounced around the London mobile scene in the previous few months but hadn’t had time to check out the details of the product. The CEO previously headed up a usability company and brings with him this experience; Taptu have hired two full time usability experts and it’s great to see the user being given prominence in the design of an interface. Anyway, they’ve just launched version 1.0 of their product, go check it out at http://taptu.com and see what you think. I’m still only a few days into using it, but it generally feels a lot cleaner and makes much more of use of the context than other services providing mobile search.
Flixwagon
The lovely Xen of MyFrame Inc handed me an N95 and unlimited data SIM on my first night in dearest Barcelona. Their product, Flixwagon allows you to take video on your mobile which is then broadcast live onto the web. I’d heard of a similar service provided by a competitor – Qik (which i’ve not yet used) and, as an avid twitter user, video was the next natural step in recording my thoughts, memories and stories, so I quickly felt at home.
Modu
Quite an interesting concept: marketed as the world’s smallest phone, that can jump into “jackets” of various forms, enabling a variety of interactions. Scheduled to launch in 6 months time, this will be an exciting product to keep an eye on.
SpinVox
These guys and gals had one of the best stands in the whole conference, hoisting up what looked like 1000 of their ‘mobsters’ onto a rig to display the latest MWC SpinVox messages. Quite a magical service too – their voicemail to text systems can even detect spoken words like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! I’m thinking this will be very handy for meetings when I need to check voicemails without actually making a call.
Google had a very low-key presence at the conference and left it up to the hardware manufacturers like Texas Instruments and ARM to showcase Android-based prototypes. During the conference the new Android SDK was released which featured a very early version of a totally-new UI look and feel, but only the old UI was seen on the conference floor (I didn’t smuggle myself into the Google meeting room, where maybe I could have got a peak at it – there’s lots of screen shots on the web of it now anyway).
Networking events
Swedish beers was the best mobile networking night of the week, where I got to meet a great selection of mobilists and mobilistas from across the globe over a few glasses of Trapist Belgian beer. Thanks once again to Helen and friends for organising the night and for the sponsors providing the free-flowing beer.
All in all, though a somewhat overwhelmingly-large conference, MWC had many interesting little nuggets scattered about, which I’ll be sure to keep a close eye on over the next year or so.
With your delicious gambas, soft sea breezes and delightful side-streets, I’m sure I’ll be back.
Until next year, goodbye Barcelona. Thank you for having me.
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