I want to let you into a big secret about the recent Mobile World Congress and your smartphone. Nothing has changed since Monday. Nobody waved a big magic wand and suddenly the world is a happier place and all your problems (even just those around smartphones and mobile communications) have been solved. You could easily argue that MWC hasn't even amounted to a hill of beans.
After all, the phones on display are pretty much out of reach for months. The Nokia N97 'changed our lives' in November 2008, yet it's still not available. The best Nokia could say is June, and even this is in only a few territories, at a rather high price. To the regular reader, that means the N97 will be in their hands (if they want it) close to a year after it was announced. Don't even mention the Sony Ericsson Idou...
Now these are edge cases, I don't seriously expect the N85 8MP (sorry, Nokia, the N86, err..... 8MP, I can never quite remember the correct branding) to take as long as a year to get into the stores, but it doesn't mean you're going to be able to pick these new models up tomorrow. You're still going to have the handset you're using – and even then you'll choose just one new phone. How do most people decide? They'll go with what the network provides.
MWC 2009 wasn't about you, the end user. It was about positioning a company when on display to the public. It was about announcing enough long term plans to give the money markets confidence that they knew what they are doing, without giving away any of their bigger surprises and changes in direction.
And with positioning comes posturing. It was vitally important that every CEO said something about the terrible economic circumstances that are happening in the world just now. Once that little nod was out the way, it was on with the rest of the presentations of the next phones and services that were slightly better than those announced last year. And while you're at it, we know you want to be green and help the environment. We also know it sounds great, marks the company out as being progressive, and by ditching the AC adaptors out the boxes makes the company a little bit more money.
So, the big news? The massive sea change that will change us forever? App stores. Yes the ability for you to find the applications that companies want you to buy, as opposed to you reading about applications online on blogs and finding them yourself... we, us - that's going to save the industry. That's what made Apple all that money (Apple, you'll note... not the majority of developers). Don't worry about the networks, because they've never quite made their stores work, so they're happy to take their cut from the Ovi Store before the developer sees the reduced cash pile.
You see? Nothing new at all from the MWC. Phones with a slightly bigger number on each line of the specification lists, and even then you'll have to wait months to see them; companies making themselves look conscientious to others; and they'll all take the best ideas from what the competition did last year.
For the pleasure of telling the world, countless members of the media flew to Barcelona, sat through countless briefings, asked to hold a new phone and were told they could only look at it or only use a handful of functions; and wrote up all the press releases on their web site by re-arranging the words - then handed a nice expenses claim in to the office.
Still, the hoteliers made a nice profit.
-- Ewan Spence, Feb 2009
PS. editor's side note: Rafe paid for his own hotel/travel for MWC 2009 - so he will have handed his expenses claim in to... himself.