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Today was the day to look a little harder at the phones and the mainstream manufacturers. The first maker to note was Motorola - their troubles are well documented in the industry, but years of living off the V3 and trying to run a myriad of operating systems has caught up. The edge of the Moto stand had 16 devices, isolated from the rest of the company's showing. Not a good indicator but perhaps a metaphor for the state of their handset business. All a little bit stale, really. Also doing stale pretty well was LG - same old, same old - no real improvements in design and not a sniff of app developer support (something Korean manufacturers are weak on). Really nothing to see on the LG stand apart from the wristwatch phone.

LG Wristwatch Phone

Sony Ericsson fared a lot better with proof that product-variety marketing isn't dead - a rash of Cybershot and Walkman devices on display - and many of them usable on the live network (brave decision!) Sony Ericsson are maintaining a good tradition of solid devices, although they are possibly lacking in the touchscreen department - the X1 got a table full of devices to itself, but frankly these Windows Mobile units are an acquired taste. I just haven't acquired it, and I'm not sure I will - I think Android will present a good opportunity to take the superb underlying hardware of the SE devices into the next generation. Blackberry had a good approach to the show. It looks like they sub-letted their stand to a plethora of other companies, with the most interesting being GoSpoken. Mike showed the GoSpoken audiobook offering and it's a really good, well-thought out service.

I was actually looking (in vain) for BlackBerry developer support but it was nice to run into the well-attended audiobook section of BlackBerry. Samsung had a nice stand, with plenty of emphasis on the Ultra device with the TouchWiz UI. I confess to being somewhat disappointed: the Ultra interface just seemed a little sleepy, not what I'd expect from Samsung. However, their handsets are flying off the shelves in the UK, so what do I know? Finally, and on the subject of touch screens, I have to mention Nokia. They had a fairly substantial area of Hall 8 marked off in Blue, with a load of handsets. Most of these were evolutions of the existing devices, and there was nothing much new there. However, I wanted to see and use the N97, of which there were a few examples (and a fair queue of people).

It's the steroid-enhanced version of the 5800, with bigger camera, flip screen to reveal a keyboard, and the kind of graphic handling seen on the iPhone. Also included is Nokia's Web Run Time environment - with Nokia's implementation of widgets on the main screen. Overall, I can see where they're headed although the software is a bit clunky - it's proto, not ready until June, and even then at EUR550 - but fair play to Nokia for showing it here. Of general interest in the Nokia standNokia Stand was the emphasis on applications and services. It's no longer about phones: this company is really moving itself into the software arena. That is the conclusion for me of the show: the market for devices is fundamentally changing. The battleground is moving to what you can do with these devices, and the old guard of 'box-shifters' needs to make way for services - sold with devices. These services are where the Congress is heading, albeit with the traditional glacial speed of the industry to begin with, but it heralds the new business arena for mobile. The future remains, as ever, interesting!

 

Barcelona blog: Into Hand