For the first time, mobile entertainment has a big presence. We are used to have it at CTIA, but here it is new. At CTIA, you have Hollywood. At 3GSM, you have Bollywood, with a mobile film premiere. I am sure the Festival people in Cannes are asking themselves why their counterparts in Barcelona had to go all the way to India instead of Europe, but that is another story...
After a good amount of years (when GSM became 3GSM...), today everyone is talking - again - about mobile bandwidth. HSDPA is everywhere. The carriers have to defend themselves from the message Intel is proposing (this year for real, I guess): "WiMAX is here"... In reality, we all know that nobody really needs that much bandwidth. A phone does not really need video... Messaging is going to be light in size because people cannot even type a long message without a keyboard. Who cares about bandwidth? 3G is more than enough...Lots of announcements about push email as well, both on the enterprise side (e.g. a ton of new Nokia phones, the Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 that I played around with, and so on) and - finally - also on the consumer side. I have the feeling our "mobile data for the masses" story is hitting the wires big time and people are noticing it. Competitors are embracing the idea (that's flattering, but I would rather be alone, thanks :-) Mobile 2.0 is happening now. Messaging is a key part of it. Let's get people what they want: a cheap way to send their pictures from their phone to their families at home. Forget bandwidth and movies on phones (please...).
So long from Barcelona, I won't talk about the parties because I am here to work (yeah, right ;-)
