I recently returned from the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, the largest mobile trade show in Europe. I did the show this year the way many of my US colleagues did – in and out in 48 hours.
The good news is that you really can do it in two days: fly in and straight to meetings, keynotes, some time on the show floor, dinners, parties, turn right around and fly home. The bad news is that you miss all the fun of the show being in Barcelona. With all the time spent in meeting rooms, cars, and hotel bars you might as well be in Cleveland.
You are reminded that you are not in Cleveland by the fantastic food and wine, of course, by the glorious architecture (seen from the taxi window) and by the ridiculous hours the city keeps. Dinner doesn’t start until 10pm, the parties don’t kick off until midnight at least, and even if you’re trying as hard as you can to make it an early night it is just impossible to get back to your room before 2am (and of course, you’re out with friends from around the world who you never see so even 2am is a stretch.)
There was a time when this was a smaller show but it really seems to be growing in importance. Two years ago it was in Cannes and around 30,000 people attended. This year in Barcelona it was twice that number. The show has moved beyond its GSM technology roots to encompass all mobile technologies at this point. And I noticed more Americans in general and US operator folks in particular at this show than before.
This is also no doubt a reflection of the global nature of the show itself. While CTIA remains the most important mobile conference in the US, it is by its nature very much US focused (by their own numbers only 20% of participants come from outside the US.) 3GSM is truly global and one of the most interesting things about it is seeing what everyone is doing in markets around the world.
There are an endless number of announcements from the show (including some of our own). Moconews did a great job of summing up the big 3GSM news here. And, being a mobile convention, there are thousands of photos taken by participants and sent to Flickr.
I was really taken with the handset manufacturers at the show. In general handset players have a lot more agency to develop features, applications, services and functionality of their own outside the US as they are often sold at retail in Europe and Asia, outside of the carrier channel. With increased importance comes, well, bigger booths and in one hall you could walk from booth to booth and get hands-on time with pretty much every new and soon-to-be-released handset.
Motorola had the very cool Z8 phone, with its unique curved design. Nokia was showing off its N77 video phone. A little boxy, yes, but the screen was large and surprisingly clear. Samsung really surprised me with the variety of their line. They were all about their second generation Ultra model of super-slim phones and they had multiple new models. There were Ultra sliders, Ultra clamshells, Ultra candy bars, Ultra 3G phones, Ultras with 3 megapixel cameras, and more. Engadget sums up the “shotgun blast” of new Samsung models here.
The coolest thing in Samsung booth wasn’t a handset, however, it was this folding ultra-mini SPH-P9000 WiMax computer (picture on the right). This thing is just amazing. It’s the size of a small paperback book and it folds out into a proper PC, keyboard and all. It’s WiMax, thus designed to be fully broadband wherever you go (wherever you go in Korea, anyway – it’s designed for existing networks in that market and won’t find its way stateside any time soon, at least not until we’ve launched some WiMax networks of our own.) You can see a video of the SPH-P9000 in action here.
Perhaps most disappointing was the mobile content section of the show. The GSM Association made a big deal out of the fact that they had a whole hall dedicated to content – Hall 7. GSMA officials talked about Hall 7 in their speeches and in the press. But when you arrived in Hall 7 there was no there there. The front of the hall was dominated by a massive Yahoo! booth filled with people eager to show off the latest (and slightly buggy) Yahoo! Go build. And offer free Yahoo! ice cream. OK, not bad as far as mobile content goes. But as soon as you ventured past Yahoo! there was little else to see. Half the hall was pornography. The other half was lots of stuff you’ve never heard of, none of it terribly compelling. TechCrunch offers a harsh review of same.
Frankly I’m not sure 3GSM needed to separate mobile content out from the rest of the show. It was, after all, on display at every carrier booth, every handset booth, and at many of the larger technology vendors. MTV Networks, for example, had lots of great new cutting edge mobile product on display at the show – only we were in the Adobe booth with our latest apps, not hidden away in a separate hall surrounded by porn. The same can be said of the other major media companies I saw at Nokia, Qualcomm, and elsewhere. Mobile content and entertainment are deeply integrated into the fabric of the wireless industry at this point. You wouldn’t have an Internet conference and create a separate room for “content”. Nor would you at a consumer electronics show. Nor should they at 3GSM.
That aside, the show was a hit and has truly turned into a must-attend event. But don’t take my word for it. The GSMA took a survey at the show and found the following:
One in four attendees surveyed said they have initiated contract negotiations at the Congress and one in 10 said they have concluded contract negotiations. Eighty-two per cent of the respondents said the Congress is the most important event in the entire global telecommunications industry and 75% said the Congress is the most important event for mobile entertainment.
See you there next year.
Informa recently put up a short interview with me at their latest Mobile TV conference in NYC this past November. 
Isaac Mendez can paint the future. Hiro Nakamura can manipulate space and time. Nathan Petrelli can fly. Hana Gitelman can… send email without a Blackberry? 
Sure, why not? 
