I think this is the last 3GSM08 post (yes, still refusing to called it MWC) I am going to make, but hey hey, it’s a light-hearted one, so why not one more….

OnePointSurveys and mBlox have released their final “Alternative Congress Stats wrap-up” - for those of you not familiar, mBlox commissioned OnePointSurveys to conduct SMS surveys of essentially non-important, light-hearted topics each day. Below you’ll find the results of the demographics survey (comments welcome), but there are also some quite amusing ones in the full results here.

• 90% of Mobile World Congress shoes are black.
• 85% people are wearing suits
• Blue is the most popular tie colour
• Attendee hair colour:  0.5% ginger, 40% black, 7% grey, 37% brunette/brown 10% Blonde, 6% N/A
• 15% are women (this rises to 20% in Hall 7)
• 75% of people have more than one mobile but alarmingly 2% left theirs at home!
• 45% of people look tired (on the Wednesday)
• 60% of people had water for lunch, 5% alcohol, 30% fruit juice, 40% coffee
• 92% of people were shorter than 6ft

[Via: Mobile Marketing Magazine]

Remember a few days back I mentioned about gaming, and how it should be advancing due to things like hardware acceleration?

Well there is a nice short video on the BBC News website, which features a mini-interview with a spokesman from Imagination Technologies - one of the companies involved in this next generation of boosting performance for things like games.

Check out that video here, you will see some familiar devices, and though the camerwork is slightly shaky in places, some interesting demos of how games are advancing on the mobile platform

[Via: BBC News]

No sooner have we crossed the mid-point of February (highlighted nicely with Valentine’s Day!), than a story about Xmas 08 appears - stop the madness! Where will it all end!?

Anyway, this story is about the battlelines being drawn up for Christmas as regards what the “hero” devices might be - in the Prepay segment (i.e. those which often sell in supermarkets).

Apparently, supermarket chains have been out at MWC, and industry experts are saying that the traditional Mobile sales pandemonium this year will be led by 5MP camera devices (such as the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95 above), in a £80-100 tier.
This would mean an extremely interesting period before Xmas, where both retailers and device vendors are scrabbling to up their numbers for Q4 - of course, what will be the prepay handsets are actually already in circulation, since they drip down from being “new postpay” to “cheap prepay” over the course of the year.

As you might expect, big players will be Nokia, SE, Samsung and LG - all with established devices in circulation - this shouldn’t rule out new devices coming on to the market though!

Last year in the MNOs, it was Orange who dived deepest, with 000,000’s of LG handsets in an super-cheap £10-20 tier. In the supermarkets, obviously bitter rivals Sainsbury’s and Tesco were major players - and this year you can be sure both these chains had buyers at MWC, making the deals for Xmas.

Of course, lest we not forget the other major forces in UK retail - Argos (a UK chain, where you buy from a catalogue in store and then the products are delivered via conveyor belt to you from a store room upstairs!) is a pivotal retailer as far as some vendors are concerned - judging by how full my local Argos was last Xmas, I would certainly not disagree!

So, it will be interesting to see how the retail landscape for Mobile devices plays out this year - and whether those 5MP prepay devices will be the difference-maker!

[Via: Mobile Today]

Following on from my post yesterday about the best 3D handsets, I’ve come across this absolute nugget of a story, which is also a remnant from MWC.

Imagination Techologies had a stand at MWC which compared the N81 (without dedicated 3D hardware) and the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95 (which does have) - so this was the N81 running graphics off it’s CPU, versus the N95 with the “turbo” provided by a dedicated chip. Luckily someone captured a video of it here.

It’s possible to see from the video that there is 50-60x acceleration achieved by dedicated HW acceleration - an argument backed up by nVidia, who I reported on yesterday also (check that out here).

Personally I can’t wait for the time when (a) this technology becomes standard and (b) vendors start to make real use of it - Nokia’s S60 Touch interface might be the first where we really see that happening…..

[Via: Pocketgamer.co.uk]

Ericsson have launched the “Ericsson Multimedia Communication Suite (MCS)”, with the goal of integrating web 2.0 content feeds in to the UI. The UI will be making an appearance on select devices, such as the SE W760i

End users will have access to new services from existing applications - so for example, knowing presence information about friends through the contat listing in their address book.

The research completed by Ericsson prior to product launch, showed that there is strong demand for the mobilisation of communication services on the internet - for example chat, sending files and presence.

The intuitive user interface integrates new MCS applications such as chat and file transfer smoothly with existing voice, video call, SMS and MMS services. In addition, hanging features such as presence off the address book enables a connected device experience.

Ericsson MCS will initially be available for selected Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) feature phones. The MCS is built on IMS architecture, and has been developed with the Rich Communication Suite (RCS) in mind - this aims for broad industry interoperability and acceptance by utilizing standardized IMS service features.

Comment: Obviously this is a platform enabler, which is going to begin to find i’s way in to devices to give the connected experience - and for that it should be commended. Further RCS-compliant solutions will no doubt add features and services, however, Ericsson is likely to see significant first-mover advantage here.

[Via: 3G.co.uk]

PacketVideo used MWC to launch their Mobile Broadcast Receiver Product - which is a smallish device that receives DVB-H signals, and then streams them out over WiFi - clever!

DVB-H is a component of the constantly hot news that is Mobile TV, and the fact that companies are looking to deliver these “DVB-H dongles”, shows another innovative way in which DVB-H could be enabled for devices that don’t include the receiver chip at point of manufacture.

There wasn’t much detail on the dongle, other than the fact that (a) it can be recharged via USB and (b) it’s using a Lithim-Ion battery. Oh and one thing - it’s being aimed at Operators, not direct to the consumer. Boo.

[Via: Register Hardware]

The Register had a chat with Mats Lindoff at MWC, and the resulting conversation some good points made in it - you can read the full thing here, but below, for brevity, is the bulleted-version:

• On why WinMo for the X1: SE need to have a broad portfolio
• On X1 sales volumes: not expected to be a high seller; for the techie niche
• On UIQ vs WinMo: UIQ is two of the newly announced handsets - G700 and G900
• On SE’s lack of CDMA: Ericsson is showing LTE at 25Mb/s (good answer!)
• Big for next year: DLNA (built on UPnP) to make handset in to universal remotes
• On innovation: C902 has R&D led tech inside it e.g. face recognition and tap-to-focus

[Via: The Register]

We have mentioned the very interesting Polymer Vision Readius before, but at MWC the Readius was out in the wild, and had people playing with it. TechDigest got some time with the device, which you can read about here - below find some key points which I thought were the most salient:

• QVGA, 5 inch screen, with 16 levels of grey per pixel
• New e-Books and RSS feeds pushed to your device at regular intervals (via 3G)
• 30 hours continuous usage (I assume you’d be quite tired after that….)
• Headset required to make calls - and no keypad - so only to Outlook-sync’d contacts
• Planned to launch through Operators, price point TBD

Here’s a pic of the device with the screen rolled out:

[Via: TechDigest]

Yahoo! oneConnect looks like a very nice applicatin for aggregating a ton of your on-the-go needs, particularly if you are one for staying in contact, and messaging your best buds. There are a bunch of instant messenger services that are accessible through oneConnect, including Messgner, AIM, and Yahoo’s own, but also some other interesting sites/services like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Last.fm.

However, it would appear that both Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Facebook perhaps are not so happy with the way that oneConnect is aggregating their content feeds (or the fact they are even doing it) - interesting, because we are seeing more and more of this cross-pollination of services in different apps/websites, and obviously everyone wants to own the aggregrating user interface! Anyhow, you can read more about oneConnect on Yahoo!’s site here.

[Via: TechDigest]

Obviously there were several hundred announcements, press releases, events and so on at MWC - however I figured this one is probably worth highlighting - if only because it shows some truly awesome UI - and we all like a good UI don’t we!

nVidia (those of meaty PC graphics card pedigree) have announced their APX 2500 platform.

If you thought the iPhone UI was spectacular, this one is a whole other level - check out videos of it running, here and here.

The specs are also quite spectacular, with up to HD-720p support (yes, that would be the same HD as for TV!), and up to 12MP camera support. Truly a beast of a platform, nVidia demo’d it running a Windows Mobile device, which the CPU and UI are designed for - methinks however they would entertain reworking this for other device vendor references!

Here is a little more detail on the specifications - if you want to check out nVidia’s site you can go here:

• ARM11 MPCore
• HD AVP (High Definition Audio Video Processor) 720p H.264, MPEG-4, and VC-1/WMV9 Decode
• 720p H.264 and MPEG-4 Encode
• Supports multi-standard audio formats including AAC, AMR, WMA, and MP3
• JPEG encode and decode acceleration
• ULP (Ultra Low Power) GeForce GPU
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• D3D Mobile
• Programmable pixel shader
• Programmable vertex and lighting
• CSAA support
• Advanced 2D graphics
• Up to 12Mpixel camera sensor support
• Advanced imaging features
• True dual display support
• 720p (1280×720) HDMI 1.2 support
• SXGA (1280×1024) LCD and CRT support
• Composite and S-Video TV output

Next-gen Mobile devices are coming in force - within 18 months I think we can expect to see some more developments that will result in devices that have an industry impact orders of magnitude greater than Mr Jobs’ device did!

[Via: Mobile Mentalism / TechDigest]