At Mobile World Congress (MWC) it’s always busy days of meetings and late nights with dinners and networking so challenging to find time to digest and report. Anyway, here’s a short snippet of the first days impressions from MWC:
Windows Phone
Lots of focus on Windows Phone generally thanks to a combination of Microsoft being a platinum sponsor of the congress and that they seem to have gone all-in in terms of marketing and PR together with Nokia and HTC.
Mozilla Firefox OS
Mozilla has become a popular underdog supported by the launch of a low cost ZTE device and 18 operators saying they will launch Mozilla devices in 2013. So far the reviews from media and developers have been good but is it enough? We will continue to watch closely.
Multi-OS trend
Thanks to Windows Phone, Mozilla OS and lesser extent Blackberry there is a big discussion about whether there might be space for more OS even though Android and iOS is still dominating
Device launches
The biggest focus has been on Nokias two new Lumia Windows phone devices and the ZTE Mozilla OS device but other handsets announced include LG with new top-end devices, Asus and Nokia 150 (a 15 euro device for developing countries). As usual Samsung is killing the competition in terms of popularity without any big device announcements (Galaxy S4 is launching 15 March at their own location NY instead). Finally HP launched a 7.1 android tablet which was a bit surprising to us and less surprisingly reviews have been mixed.
CNET provides a good short report on device launches: http://m.cnet.com/news/on-day-1-of-mobile-world-congress-heres-what-mattered/57571120
Enterprise mobility
In enterprise everyone (SAP, IBM, Oracle, etc) are talking about MEAP (mobile enterprise application platforms) as the must have but for businesses. We think it’s mainly a buzz word 4 letter abbreviation for a packaged solution based on legacy platforms, web services and HTML5 but let’s see if there is any substance.
The coolest demo of the day was DTS demonstration of their software/SDK that makes mid range headphones(40 USD) sound like a 10.000 USD full audio surround system. More to follow on this!
That’s all for today! Stay tuned for more.
