Mobile World Congress 2010: predictions
Next week there's this little annual gathering in Barcelona. I hear it has something to do with mobile phones.
As usual, I won't be there. I know, you're weeping tears of sorrow at this point.
Also as usual, I'll be here (well, mostly on Twitter these days) reporting on stuff that matters. On the bits that are actually interesting because of the content, not the number of retweets they already have. You know, lame stuff.
I'll try to not get Twitter upset by posting more than a certain number of tweets per hour. Seriously, the number is secret. I got a forced 15-minute chill-out period from Twitter last year during Nokia World. And no, I don't know that his has happened to anyone who actually attended that event. I guess you do focus better from home.
Predictions?
Microsoft will announce something something 7. Or at least show you a nice PowerPoint of it. Cross-marketing and all that. Will they blow that too? Hard to tell. Rumors are coming in that they will, but I don't usually care about rumors. If I did, the iPad would have been one of the major disappointments of this generation of this decade.
I think Steve (not God, the other, more shouty Steve) will wave bye-bye at the end of this fiscal year (hint: that's next year) if they blow this too. Or at least he should. I'm still hoping that instead of blowing it, they'll blow our minds, but... I don't know. Just pure hope at this point. Anyway, it might not even matter to us outside the US, if they decide to pull a Zune HD with it.
The worse it is, the longer my post about it will be, so stay tuned and watch out. Hopefully for nothing.
Nokia won't be announcing any new phones at MWC this year, some very well-documented (and way better monetized than mine) blog said.
And it's oh so very true. Well, I guess they would have announced new phones at MWC if Samsung, LG or anyone else would have lent Nokia the space to do so.
The reason Nokia will, indeed, not be announcing any new stuff whatsoever at MWC is... because they won't be there. At all. They're across the road. You can wave if you want.
Strange, this? Well, yeah, a little bit. But awesome in a very cool way. I have no idea what their real reason is, since just costs sounds too thin for me, but hey...watch out when you do cross that street!
C-series. My guess? C stands for Competitively priced. Which is PR speak for cheap. The first sub-100 euro smartphone? One can dream.
There also seems to be a successor to the E63 prepped. Some say it will also be a C. Good call in my opinion. Teenagers shouldn't be scared off by the Enterprise designation (not that they're not into Blackberries, at least in the UK, apparently...).
A superphone? A megaphone? :D
Well, we may see the N87. In press renderings, at least (no, those can't possibly qualify to be named pictures, sorry).
Am I excited?
I will next be excited about a Symbian-powered Nokia smartphone when they realize that 256MB of RAM is not that much more expensive for them to buy than 128MB. And Symbian^1^2^3 (had to do that) needs at least 256. Sorry. True.
Maemo?
It's busy killing stuff. Will be right back. In Q3. Or Q4. With Qt. Nothing we don't already know. I am hoping that Nokia got the "it's not cool to announce something 6-9 months before its general availability" clue. If not, N920 it is. Or whatever else they decide on calling it. Excited? If the press documents state the following, black on white : portrait mode fully integrated.
Samsung will do their Bada thing, which sounds like it will feature full Bing integration (I know, easy puns...). A match made in...well, I don't know where. Another smartphone OS? If Apple gets away with being control-freaks, that doesn't really mean everyone should copy that.
Other than that, I'm sure Samsung will hit us with dozens of new devices, not one of them that you'll remember 5 minutes after you first heard about it. That does remind me of another company's MO of years past... And, as in the case of Nokia (it was them I was referring to), Samsung will sell loads of these devices, of that I'm sure. It's just not the thing you get excited about. And they won't catch Nokia in number of devices sold anytime soon anyway, so next.
Wait, that's all I've got. I'm sure we'll have some interesting stuff from other manufacturers, but we'll have to wait and see. I would however like to see a more aggressive approach from Huawei and ZTE. Now that MediaTek cleared its Qualcomm issues (is that a trend lately? Or are Qualcomm's lawyers just getting soft?), there's no reason not to.
Oh. And I'd also like a Tegra2 demo, Nvidia. And anyone (else) who manages to show a working device fitted with a Cortex A9 gets a free blog post.
The countdown can begin then. One week.
PS: Did you notice I forgot to mention anything about SonyEricsson or Android? There's a reason for that.
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