MWC 2012

Barcelona was the place to be last week. The 2012 Mobile World Congress (MWC), which has just come to an end, showcased technological advances, brought together the big – and not so big – players of the mobile industry for a few days and gave us a glimpse of what is soon to come to our nearest mobile shops.

At first glance, it is clear from all the displays and presentations that Android-based platforms are taking the market by storm, leaving proprietary systems such as iOS and Windows behind (as they are struggling to compete with the open source, community-based development model). Surprisingly (for a sector that is driven by fierce innovation and characterised by a trigger-happy approach to copyright infringement lawsuits), handset and interface designs are looking more and more similar. MWC 2012 was a sea of slim, black phones with large touchscreens populated by rows of colourful square icons – it takes a keen eye to distinguish one handset from another.

Under the bonnet, however, there are exciting developments. Forget the cliché “a smartphone is like a hand-held computer” – most of the smartphones displayed in MWC 2012 have in fact more processing power than the computers I use at work. Quad core processors and high resolution screens allow these new handsets to run fairly resource-intensive software. In addition, a proof of concept demonstration of 4G data connectivity achieved speeds of 1.429 gigabits-per-second, which puts broadband speeds to shame.

All this extra umph is opening up new and exciting possibilities. My personal favourite is the mobile-desktop hybrid idea. Since some smartphones are now powerful enough to run a full-fledged OS, developers are making them do just that. There is no need to go through the hassle of syncing your phone or trusting all your personal files to a cloud server located on the other side of the world. Instead, we can now carry our entire OS with us in our handset. Simply dock the phone into a laptop, desktop or any other compatible device wherever you go and boot up. When you’re done using it, slide the phone out and off you go. This is potentially a revolutionary response to the portability-display compromise.

With regard to content, things are not quite as rosy. Although MWC had planned for a good range of content-based displays and presentations (e.g. the App Planet, developers conferences, and even dedicated mobile learning sections), the level of innovation shown by mobile content struggled to match the level of attention devoted to processors and connection speeds. Android devices might be based on community-driven development models, but it is clear that when it comes to spending money on innovation, corporate interests dictate the agenda in a fiercely competitive market.