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]

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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]

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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]

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• UK: Top 10 phones, commencing 1/8/08

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]

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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]

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So Mobile World Congress (MWC) is all done now, and for me personally it was a hectic period – probably too hectic, on reflection. Lots of deals were done, alcohol consumed – oh, and there were some Mobile devices and services there too. Below are just a couple of offbeat observations from the show:

1. People are still calling it 3GSM rather than MWC – the show has changed quite a bit in the last few years, and this is one of the significant changes – however I can’t help think that 3GSM has a better tagline to it – it’s a bit like “CES” or “CeBIT” – everyone in the industry instantly knows to which show you are referring. Maybe with time MWC will catch on…. or not.
2. Location, Location, Location – anyone whose wife/partner makes them watch property shows will know that the only thing that is important about buying a house is it’s location – likewise I think for MWC. It’s moved from Cannes to Barcelona in recent years, and from what feedback I heard, there’s just as much posititve as negative comment on this. What was interesting though is that there are whispers about it moving to Madrid next year….!
3. Comedy taglines on stands – this year, there were a huge number of amusing “marketized” statements from Companies on their stands and suchlike – you can see a bunch of them here. My personal favourite though was LG’s, which read: “Smartly Intelligent”…! I don’t even want to get in to the abuse of grammar and context here, but if you were to say that smart and intelligent are oft-regarded as having similar meaning in everyday conversation, then you could approximate that statement to “Intelligently intelligent” – which clearly is the opposite of “Stupidly Stupid”

Ben

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Zi Corporation, a leading provider of intelligent interface solutions, recently announced the introduction of QixLinks and QixLinks Ads, two radical new developments of its on-device search and discovery engine Qix. These products will offer users direct access to portal content and advertisements, driving greater ARPU for operators.

QixLinks and QixLinks Ads are targeted to deliver the top 1,000 high-value mobile content and advertising keywords to users. Qix offers the ability to showcase select operator content and hand-off to standard mobile search vendors for accessing other content. QixLinks enables discovery and repeated use by including natural language words a user might think to enter to find content.

During the 3GSM, Zi Corporation also introduced the new version of Qix for Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile powered devices.

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During a demo ride at the 3GSM show, MobileBurn had a chance to see the new Nokia 6110 Navigator in action on the streets of Barcelona.

According to them, due the lack of a large touch screen, the 6110 Navigator will probably never be as easy to use as a dedicated GPS navigation system. However, being able to get full featured navigation from a phone that you already own is sure to win some converts over to Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s way of looking at things… You can read the full story from here.

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At the 3GSM Symbian Press/Wiley showcased its new title – “S60 Programming: A Tutorial Guide”. The book is co-authored by Reuben Edwards, senior lecturer in mobile applications and a Forum Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Champion, and Reuben Edwards, lecturer in games and m-commerce who has been at the forefront of innovative mobile multimedia application development for over ten years.

Authors argue that the new book will prove to be an invaluable aid to academic and professional programmers alike who want to learn S60 and wish to quickly attain a level of competence where they can develop their own applications for the commercial market.

More information is available from here.

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Yet another Linux platform. This one is developed by Qtopia. Their Greenphone recently went on sale, but only for the interested developers. What will happen with this platform – it’s hard to tell at the moment. One thing is certain – at the end, we’ll have no more than 2-3 mainstream Linux platforms. In the meantime, enjoy the short hands-on Greenphone video.

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emoze’s PR has been working around the clock during the 3GSM, as they confronted their service against BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM). Two duelers using emoze and BlackBerry battled it out to see who could provide users with their emails quickest, and emoze emerged as comfortable winners.

Both shooters stood back to back with their respective handsets – one a BlackBerry, the other a regular mobile phone with the emoze push email application installed. A Gmail account was opened and the email address given to the two duelers. They both created an email on their handsets, walked three paces and on the count of three, turned around and pushed ’send’. The audience watched a screen to see whether the email sent via BlackBerry or emoze would arrive fastest, and as the tension started to build, the emoze email appeared in the inbox first.

Now, I would argue that you shouldn’t look at this as a cheap marketing trick. emoze is a great service that basically does the same as BlackBerry (push-email), but is not that much known as the de-facto industry leader. Still, emoze gives its best to out-do the BlackBerry and users who have been playing with it are more than satisfied. emoze works with many handsets and it’s free!

According to emoze, their strength is in the particular push-event technology which synchronizes only on incoming and outgoing events, rather than via periodical connections to the email server and checks for change. This not only saves the user connectivity-related costs but also delivers increased efficiency in device power consumption, memory use and CPU.

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During the 3GSM, I had a chance to meet with the CMO of Mobispine – Joakim Hilj. The goal of this Swedish based company is to bring the RSS to the mass market mobile audience. By providing users with a very easy to use interface, they may be onto something. Joakim pointed out that what Mobispine’s service tries to do is to be some kind of a mobile Netvibes – to give its users a homepage-like one-click access to their favorite RSS feeds.

To reach their goal Mobispine doesn’t only show you RSS feeds you select, they also aggregate them, assuring the fast access for the end user. Furthermore, users can browse or search their favorite feeds using Mobispine’s easy to use, data-consumption friendly JavaME application. Mobispine has also added the viral component in their app – every user can send Mobispine to a friend or a colleague via SMS, using an option from the menu.

Back to business. Mobispine hopes to monetize its service by showing small ads in the feeds. Something that Feedburner and some other companies already does in the non-mobile world. Mobispine’s advantage is obvious – great, easy to use application which steadily gains traction (especially among the heavy data consumption users), combined with the subtle PR activities to engage bloggers.

Having a coffee with Joakim was a pleasent time. He certainly knew what he was talking about, and all I can do afterwards, is write good things about Mobispine.

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Also from the 3GSM. As I’ve been browsing around, I’ve stumbled on Eleksen’s fabric keyboards. It’s a very nice concept, but frankly, couldn’t see myself buying one of those. On the other hand, I’ve nothing against having play/pause and related music-plating buttons integrated in my jacket. That totally makes sense.

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At the 3GSM, Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) held a media and analyst briefing to issue an open invitation to phone vendors to become shareholders in UIQ Technology AB following their acquisition of the Swedish software company from Symbian Ltd on February 2. UIQ Technology AB licenses the UIQ user interface framework and application suite to phone vendors. At the briefing Sony Ericsson President Miles Flint said that UIQ will remain an independent company and that phone vendors are invited to license UIQ as well as become shareholders in the company.

Sony Ericsson is already a licensee of UIQ and has shipped a number of phones based on Symbian OS and UIQ such as the P990 business-centric smartphone and the high-end Walkman W950 with 4GB of onboard storage.

Sony Ericsson is in discussions with handset vendors regarding expanding the future ownership of UIQ Technology but wanted to use the opportunity of 3GSM in Barcelona to issue an open invitation to them. Sony Ericsson expects to make further announcements about new shareholders and licensees in the coming months.

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Birdstep recently launched SmartVoice, a Mobile VoIP extension to the market leading SmartConnect products for dual-radio SmartPhones with WiFi and cellular capabilities. The new client includes Windows Mobile and Symbian support, full re-branding capabilities and a patented mechanism for automatic switching between WiFi and cellular networks.

A mobile subscriber using the SmartVoice client maintains his or her cellular number, while the technology provides voice call continuity, even when WiFi connection is broken in the middle of a call. The client replaces the built-in dialer in the Smartphone, and provides full integration with existing phone features such as the built-in address book for easy dialing. SmartVoice utilize Birdsteps patented technology for seamless roaming.

SmartVoice has been developed by the subsidiary VoiceRoaming Technology AS, a subsidiary that is owned to 55% by Birdstep and 45% by TeleVenture, the people behind Telenor Venture.

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HTC’s recently announced X7500, also known as the Athena, is quite strange device to understand. It is an ultimate Windows Mobile-powered device, but still I’m not sure who would want that. It’s not a UMPC, yet it’s huge to carry around. I guess a Bluetooth headset is a must with this device…

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More from the 3GSM. Here’s my short hands on the HTC S710 smartphone. It has one of most coolest form factors I’ve ever seen. The standard keypads combined with the sliding QWERTY keyboard looks amazing. Both for fun and for business. I like it…

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The 3GSM was a perfect opportunity for UIQ Technology to release its latest UIQ 3 theme – Barcelona. The image of a beautiful Spanish city located by the Mediterranean sea is something many of us would want to carry around. Just imagine – a piece of the Gaudi art which fits in your pocket. Having that kind of a theme on your device is certainly inspiring.

So, Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) smartphone owner – what are you waiting for? Here’s the link for UIQ 3 themes.

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ShoZu, a mobile multimedia service that allows you to download and upload content to your mobile phone, has been very busy lately. Beside the “Z8 deal“, ShoZu also announced:

1. An agreement with Azteca Interactive, the mobile and interactive arm of TV Azteca, to distribute TV Azteca content to mobile phone users in the Mexican and Latin American market through ShoZu’s ZuCast media delivery service. The service is set to go live in May 2007.

2. An agreement with Atlantic Records that will allow select bands, equipped with ShoZu-enabled camera phones, to upload the photos and video clips in near-real time for distribution to artist and fan sites, MySpace and other popular online destinations.

3. Support for geotagging. ShoZu’s Share-It one-click image uploading service now offers location tagging for photos and video clips sent from GPS-enabled phones to Flickr and YouTube as well as Buzznet, Dada.net, moblogUK, Pikeo and Textamerica. At the moment, ShoZu is the only upload service that provides automatic geotagging for cameraphone uploads to more than one Internet destination.

4. A distribution agreement with Amp’d Mobile, America’s leading mobile entertainment company targeted at youth and young professionals. The Share-It service will expand Amp’d Mobile’s social networking feature set by enabling subscribers to easily transmit photos and video clips to nearly two dozen media sharing, blogging and community sites using a single ShoZu application on the handset.

5. ShoZu also extended its media service to Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Windows Live Spaces, enabling direct handset-to-blog uploads of photos and video clips.

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And the new Communicator is here. I got my hands on the Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s flagship device shortly at the S60’s booth. All I can say is wow! But, the E90 Communicator is not for everyone. First there’s the size – the new device is just a little bit bigger than the 9300, and many people will find this as a big no. And then the price – have no doubt about it, this is an expansive business device. Still – it rocks!

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