The next year will certainly be an interesting one where technology is concerned, reports Aideen Shortt from the Mobile World Congress
The Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2012 took place in Barcelona, Spain, at the end of February, with a record 67,000 attendees from more than 200 countries.
This was my first time at the event and although I was warned in advance about its vastness, it still didn’t prepare me for the 1,500 exhibitors across eight halls. MWC dwarfs any other exhibition or conference I have ever attended and every household name in mobile telecoms, except Apple, was present.
It was the opinion of several experts at the congress that Apple should have attended. Technology, especially mobile, has cycles and nobody is untouchable. Having once been the underdog, Apple should know this. There is no safe position in the industry and who is to say that the company’s stronghold can’t be usurped, especially since, as a single device, Samsung’s Galaxy S2 now outsells the iPhone and has done for many months.
In the absence of Apple, Google owned the show, with android figures omnipresent on the stand of every company running on any version of an Android operating system.
The corporates and tech junkies were on the hunt at the event for new launches, of which there were plenty. For many, the darling was not mobile, but Sony’s new PS Vita, which attracted large crowds to the demonstration table, playing Uncharted and Little Deviants using the new rear touchpad and six-axis gyroscope.
Smaller hardware companies made a disproportionate impact with new high-spec devices. HTC had a wide range of One handsets, which retail at various price points, and the lesser known Huawei from China, who has been known to date as a supplier of mid-range devices, upped the ante with high-spec, attractive smartphones.
Nokia came under some fire for its new Symbian releases in a world where iOS and Android are currently the only ecosystems of note. Time will tell as to how much share Nokia can claim, but showcasing and launching its Lumia 610, a “budget” Windows phone, demonstrated a smart strategy for the company whose stronghold is the Java market in demographics, along with countries where price is the single critical factor. It is evident that Nokia is strategically targeting the featurephone upgrade market of its own customer base and, given its dominance in this sector, we could start seeing a shift in favour of the Finns.
This feature can be read in full in the second 2012 edition of iNTERGAMINGi.
