Mobile World shake-up
Every year in February anyone who has anything to do with mobile technology gathers at the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) to show off, or catch up with, the latest in mobile technology. Last year MWC attracted close to 50 000 visitors from more than 180 countries and this year’s show in Barcelona promises to be even bigger.
Just as most hardware makers tend to store up their “next-big-thing” for the Consumer Electronics Show every January, mobile makers do the same for the MWC. We look at some of the expected announcements at this year’s show.
South Korean splash
Samsung and LG, South Korea’s two largest cellphone makers, will be showing off their latest phones at this year’s show. The two phones will both have touchscreens, WiFi and links to popular social networking sites built in.
Samsung’s Monte has a 3-inch full-touch display and will include widgets and applications for popular sites including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Bebo and a number of popular instant messaging networks. The phone includes a GPS receiver and a 3.2 megapixel camera. The phone will also ship with Exchange ActiveSync and Google Sync to synchronize e-mail, contacts and other data with a PC.
LG will release the GD880 Mini with a 3.2-inch touch display, slightly larger than the Samsung Monte. It will also include tools for connecting to Facebook and Twitter as well as having a social network feed function to combine updates from different networks into one. The GD880’s camera is also bigger than the Monte’s at 5 megapixels and includes A-GPS.
Bada-Boom
Samsung will also be releasing its new Bada-based phone at MWC. Bada is a new operating system from Samsung that is based on Linux and is designed for new-generation smartphones. Samsung announced the system last year but this will be its first-ever Bada based phone. The Bada phone is expected to have a 3.5-inch touchscreen.
Opera for iPhone
Also to be shown off at MWC will be Opera’s browser for the iPhone. The preview of the iPhone Opera version will be limited to invited guests and media only and a full public release will only be available later this year. Opera claims [http://twitter.com/opera/statuses/8894295231] that in its own tests its version of Opera on iPhone was as much as six times faster than Apple’s own Safari browser.
Windows Mobile 7
One thing that most people are looking forward to at this year’s show is Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 7 phone. Although the company hasn’t said explicitly that it will be showing off WM7 in Barcelona there is enough evidence to make it a safe bet. Windows Mobile 7 is perhaps Microsoft’s most important release to date as it faces up to growing competition in the smartphone space from the likes of Google and Apple. When Microsoft released WM6.5, a stop-gap release, last year users were mostly disappointed at the lack of features. Despite hyping WM7 prior to the launch of WM6.5 Microsoft backed down on releasing version 7 in favour of the limited-improvement 6.5 version. Barcelona is going to be a tough testing ground for Microsoft’s latest mobile phone OS.
Nokia
Nokia has said that it is not planning to make any significant announcements at this year’s congress. The company has only just release the N900, its Linux Maemo-based smartphone, and last week finally released its Symbian operating system as open source software. Nokia has said that it will be releasing devices in its C Series phone in the near future. The C Series is a new grouping of devices that will go alongside the N Series and the E Series.
Mobile World 2010 << discussion
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