We have less than 100 hours to go until the doors of the world’s biggest and best known mobile conference swing open in Barcelona for another year, so let’s pause to see what we have to look forward to.

As all good conferences, there’s nothing like guzzling alcohol paid for by someone else (who you most likely spent most of the day bitching about). The MWC veteran @LisaWhelan has put together an excellent MWC party list at so start clicking (or tell your PA to). Many are free and not all are yet full.

For something a little more interactive the Mobile Woodstock crew have created an unofficial app. Download it here.

What will be in the news?

The PR machine of companies large and small will be in overdrive. Here are my picks:

• Tablet nirvana – tablets will be the “touch” of last year
• Shrinking femto cells, 4G, smart downloading – everyone will be promising “it will be faster”
• App Store arguments will rage on – it’s the new “who’s king of content” conversation of old
• and finally, Nokia will announce something big in terms of O/S direction and be criticised for it
  ..or they won’t and they’ll be criticised for that too.

View of the madness from the steps going up to the Museum of National Art of Catalonia, Photo credit: Philipp Deprez

The Social Network

I’m always sceptical when unwieldy organisations try and build their own “social network”. In their wisdom the GSMA are no exception and if you attended last year you can go ahead and login; otherwise sign up provided you have a pass. To be fair to the GSMA you can download the Powerpoint presentations post the event although I do find page loads terribly slow.

• Did you use the MWC Social Network last year? Useful or a complete waste of time? Let us know in the comment or tweet @mobileindustry

First time at MWC?

For first timers at MWC, read the seven top tips for Mobile World Congress which have been posted on Mobile Industry Review the last weeks; or follow my quick 5 reminders are below:

• Stealing is rife. Barcelona has it’s charms but also it’s problems. Yes you always think it won’t happen to you; but it may well. For Valentine week Barcelona is literally the bag-snatch and petty thief capital of the world. Adopt absolute vigilance.
• Eating is a hassle. Cues for “lunch” consisting of a dry baguette with slice of dead pig can be long. Restaurants nearby are booked or full. So eat at unusual times and plan ahead.
• Accommodation is expensive. Oh wait, you didn’t already book? Good luck…you’ll need it.
• Consultant constipation. There will be more social media gurus and corporate consultants this year than ever before as the role of Twitter and Facebook for businesses grows rapidly. A lot of these people haven’t actually done that much in tech, mobile or social media. The latter is the new gold rush – the new SEO. It is valuable – so don’t underestimate your lack of strategy – but sharlatons are rife. You’ve been warned.
• Meetings madness. Don’t meet with people who come from where you live. It amazes me how many people ask to do this! With 50,000 delegates find those from a far flung place whom might benefit your business who you don’t usually see. In anycase, you’ll magnate back to familiar faces after the fifth or six beer anyway…
• Bonus tip: Did I mention Barcelona is full of thieves? On my 13^th trip to Barcelona, in a posh restaurant, sitting with 3 Googlers my bag including laptop, camera & passport disappeared; with the restaurant staff claiming no knowledge. Petty crime is so bad it’s almost worth leaving a phone on INSIDE your bag running Google Lattitude just incase some crook dressed in a suit scuttles off with it. You think it won’t happen to you – it will. The Police don’t care, the locals accept it and many bar/restaurant staff turn a blind eye. Be careful!

So, feeling prepared? If you have an interesting product, service, technology or application you’d like me to cover, please contact me.

See you in Basque country!

Some of the questions I asked him:

* What was his first mobile phone?
* How did he get interested in Symbian? (There were some broken bones involved)
* Why do you like the community-led approach of open systems?
* Just how frustrating does he find it when the uninformed ask, ‘Is Nokia/Symbian dead?‘
* Who won the Smartphone wars?

I thoroughly recommend taking a bit of time to watch.

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If you’d like to get a feed of all our videos, you can subscribe to our channel on Youtube, or you can subscribe to get updates via the dedicated podcast channel on iTunes (iTunes Podcast subscription link, free obviously!).

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Here’s the video…

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Well, here I am… Rafe filmed me doing an intro to the device here:

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And for anyone who’s interested in the phone, we also got the Sony Ericsson chaps to take us on a walk through of it, here:

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I would seriously consider getting one of these ‘for the weekend’. I particularly like the ‘Pro’ which comes with an integrated QWERTY keyboard…

Christof Hellmis is a highly affable and passionate chap. I believe Rafe had met him quite a few times before, but our interview at Mobile World Congress was my first opportunity to say hello. When I say Christof is passionate, he perhaps doesn’t necessarily display it in the traditional sense (e.g. arms waving, spluttering with delight). Instead he’s calm, confident, direct — you’ll see in Part 1, the first question we asked was ‘Tell us about the Ovi Maps 3.0 launch’ (where Nokia announced free maps and navigation).

Christof’s immediate response?

“For us, January 21st was a lifetime milestone…”

Right then. My kind of guy! So if you’re into mobile maps and navigation and the possibilities surrounding the technology, these two videos will be of supreme interest.

Here’s Part 1:

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And then, Part 2:

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Let’s see what’s on his mind!

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So how did Annsi handle that question?

He got stuck right in. He wasn’t sitting back and trying to remember the talking points, no. I witnessed a chap who sincerely believes (and, has most probably seen) in his vision for the future. It makes really, really interesting viewing — especially his assertion that the generic mobile interface for consuming ‘media’ will be a map.

I really was impressed that this ‘grey-haired’ executive could talk-the-talk. I really hope that he continues to galvanise the team at Nokia (and, to a lesser extent, the Symbian and MeeGo teams) to deliver the vision he described in this video.

I don’t think Anssi was being creative when, in Part 1, he commented that (in relation to the N97 failures) his ‘sleepless nights are now in the past’. For someone as enthusiastic and as excited about the possibilities of mobile technology, it must have been a galling experience watching the utter derision with which consumers and the media greeted the arrival of the bug-laden disappointing Nokia N97.

What the hell were Nokia doing delivering the N97 into the marketplace as a high-end top-of-the-range device when it was going to get immediate comparisons to other bleeding-edge devices (and be found wanting, by everyone but the die-hard Nokia fans).

Of course the N97 and the N97 mini were a total success. Commercially. Annsi was careful to point this out. They shipped millions of them to their customers. But remember, the customers, of course, were the mobile operators, who, frankly, couldn’t-give-a-damn. They’d already committed to adding the ‘next’ Nokia device into their range whether it was good, bad or entirely rubbish. The end-consumers, however, well… I’m reasonably sure a lot of them fully intend not making the same mistake every again.

I think Annsi is right, however, when he makes the point that consumers really do trust Nokia. Or at least, they want to do so. They will, as Annsi maintains, “give us a second chance.” But just once. I think Nokia really must work hard to make sure that the high-end devices they ship into the marketplace this year are fantastic.

Anyway, to the video. If you’re even half interested in Nokia, if you follow the mobile industry, I strongly recommend sitting and watching Part 3 of the interview.

I’m willing to bet that even the most ardent iPhone and BlackBerry fans reading are closet Nokia fans too…

For convenience I’ve put all the parts together here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

As I walked around the MobileFocus event last week I spotted this rather swanky 5-inch Dell Mini 5 tablet unit on the Dell table. The chap behind the table obliged us with a hands-on demo. It’s just a preview unit but goodness me it’s looking gorgeous.

It really did look highly attractive — and whilst it’s definitely not an iPad, I could imagine using one of these around the house and for work, especially if it was competitively priced.

What do you think? Would you have one of these Android devices?

Also: Check out this interview at Laptop Mag with the Mini 5 creator.

Anssi also goes into some detail about how Symbian fits into the Nokia ecosystem — his answer is a fascinating one. If you’re still thinking Nokia are about to dump the platform, think again. As Anssi points out, the platform is going to continue to be integral to the company’s success, particularly given the fact that MeeGo and Symbian will have Qt and common web runtime as the unifying layer for 85% of application and service development. I’m particularly excited to see what developers will make of this.

Have a watch:

Theoretically Nokia could spend the next year in bed and still be the dominant player this time next year. The reality of course is that the company is focused on it’s mid-tier portfolio, as the Garnter analyst, Ms Milanesi, points out:

“Nokia will face a tough first half of 2010 as improvement to Symbian and new products based on the Meego platform will not reach the market well before the second half of 2010,” said Ms Milanesi. “Its very strong mid-tier portfolio will help it hold market share, but its ongoing weakness at the high end of the portfolio will hurt its share of market value.”

The developing markets are still going to be buying bucketloads of Nokia handsets, so Nokia’s top chaps are still going to get their bonuses. For us here in the West, though, hoping to once again actually obsess over new high-end Nokia devices, well… it’s going to be quite a long wait.

As for Symbian, well, they’re still comfortably occupying the top spot in the ever mysterious ‘smartphone’ category with 80.8 million units sold this year against RIM’s 34m and iPhones 24m. Of course we’ve seen a decline — Symbian owned 52.4% of the Smartphone market in 2008 against 46.9% in 2009. Android — ever the poster boy of the ‘open’ platforms (which isn’t really very open at all), is languishing at almost 7m devices. Still good, but quite a way to go yet.

If you sit and look at this table, you have to wonder why developers are even bothering with iPhone, Android — and especially Palm:

If you add up iPhone, Android and Palm Smartphone sales in 2009, the total comes to just under 33 million devices. Symbian shipped more than double that. The challenges for developing on the Nokia/Symbian platform are well documented — but the moment Qt becomes a realistic, usable choice for developers (and that moment is coming) — it’s going to be very interesting to see how Symbian users will react to easily consumable mobile applications and services.

Qt, if you haven’t come across it yet, is an all new write-once run-anywhere (well, any supported device) developer environment for Symbian, MeeGo and a whole host of other devices. We’ve got some videos of this coming shortly and whilst it isn’t necessarily going to be all that useful for the current addressable Symbian/Nokia market, the next generation are looking to be phenomenally accessible.

If you’re a mobile developer — or you work in that area, definitely take a look at the videos we’re publishing shortly. I strongly recommend keeping one eye on Symbian and MeeGo whilst your efforts are elsewhere.

What does Lee Williams, Executive Director of Symbian make of the Gartner news?

Here’s a quote I got into my inbox this afternoon:

“We certainly welcome Gartner’s predictions around the renewed vitality of the mobile device market. Earlier this month, we not only announced the latest version of the Symbian platform, Symbian^3, but also that the source code for our platform is now fully open source. The latter announcement represents ten years of investment and billions of dollars worth of code – all of which is now available for download and development by the developer community, for free.

This will foster even greater creativity and innovation in the mobile industry, as now any individual or organisation can take, use and modify the code for any purpose. We look forward to keeping apace with Gartner’s prediction for double digit growth for the mobile industry in 2010.”

Part 1 below is all about the N97. Anssi specifically wanted to deal with that first before we got on with the rest of the interview.

Watch this video and see what you think, I’m going to post my view of the video shortly.

Sites that have picked up the story so far:
- 3GSM-news
- Tietokone (Finnish Computer Magazine)
- Talouselama (Finnish Business trade press)
- DigiToday (Finland’s online business paper)
- Tweakers.net
- SymbianFrance
- Engadget
- Gizmodo

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Android, as Lee put it, exists to serve Google’s specific interests. Lee goes on to point out that as Symbian is entirely open (“Andy Rubin and others from Google can come sit on our councils, they can come check in code”) and believes this will make all the difference to the Symbian platform’s development over time.

Have a watch of the video and see what you think:

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In the next few minutes we’ll be publishing Lee talking with major Symbian open-source contributor, Sasken and DeviceAnywhere. We actually recorded these on-site on Tuesday morning at Mobile World Congress.

Meanwhile back in London we asked Lee what he thought of the Android platform — and whilst he was perfectly civil, he was careful to point out the critical issue with Android — that it benefits Google, Google and thrice Google. Of course, handset manufacturers and operators haven’t been doing too badly, which is fine, as long as their objectives align entirely with those of Google. Standby, I’ll be publishing in a moment.

Note: I’ve decided to use Vimeo to host the footage so that it’s easily embeddable (as apposed to the proprietary Mobile Developer TV format). Do lift it if you’d like to use it.

I normally make use of two Apple Mac Pro towers, each with four processors and gigabytes of RAM — four 28.5″ screens, multiple terabyte drives and two broadband connections. That’s how we’re setup at MIR Towers. That makes the process fast and efficient.

Rafe and I sat down on Friday and worked out the content plan, so here’s what you should expect:

- We’re going to play the content out over 5 weeks. Dumping 10-12 hours of content on you this week won’t work very well.
- We’ve limited the amount of editing we’re doing — that is, where possible, we’ll bring you the full interviews and the full hands-on coverage that we shot. We might as well. Other ‘stations’ have to compress everything into 2-minute chunks, we don’t have that restriction.
- We’ll give some priority to the videos that are particularly time sensitive

I’m looking forward to seeing what you think!

And if you missed my newsletter on Nokia at MWC over the weekend, make sure you sign-up to future editions here.

Once again I’d like to thank everyone at Symbian for their support in helping us get to Mobile World Congress and create such fantastic content — we simply couldn’t have done it without them.

Posted via email from MIR Live

I’m pleased we managed to get Caroline on camera this morning. She is behind the always useful and well attended WIPJAM developer events at the likes of MWC and CTIA.

– Taken at 5:03 PM on February 18, 2010 – uploaded by ShoZu

Posted via email from MIR Live

Posted via email from MIR Live

And they know next to nothing about the handsets. That gets annoying. I usually end up having to ‘sell’ the devices to myself whilst the Abercrombie girl or guy is busy trying to describe the ‘goodness’ of the camera.

It’s a total nightmare. Especially if you want to try and capture that ‘pitch’ on camera.

Case in point: I was at a Samsung event the other day. One of the handsome chaps was standing with a girl, both wearing Samsung livery and bearing Samsung phones.

“GSM or CDMA?” I asked.

Blank looks.

“What network is it on?” I asked, hoping that would certainly help narrow it down.

“Errrr,” they both said in unison. Okay then. That clearly wasn’t on the 5-minute briefing they got.

“Do you like the phone?”

Nods.

“What phone do you use?”

Both of them bring out Blackberries. Oooh dear. Fail. I mean, be honest, but be on-message too?

Anyway back to Sony Ericsson. Rafe and I set our expectations to ‘Fucking Shite’ and began setting up the camera.

A chap came over and asked if we needed a demo. Good good. We said yes and explained we needed a demo of everything. I could see Rafe rolling his eyes with boredom. Yet more tedious, ‘and it’s got a megapixels too’ shit.

Turns out our expectations were entirely wrong.

Imagine the shock we got when one of the highly competent chaps showing us one phone said, “Hey, you know what, why don’t you talk to Maiko Ishida, she’s just in the back.”

As the chap strode off purposefully, Rafe and I both looked at each other.

“Who?”

Maiko arrived. A very well turned out young lady. Here she is:

“And what do you do?” asked Rafe.

“I’m responsible for that,” she said, pointing at the Sony Ericsson Vivaz in Rafe’s hand.

“And,” she continued, “I’m also responsible for this,” she said, holding up a Vivaz Pro.

Turns out she’s the Product Planner in charge of delivering both.

And goodness me she knew her stuff. She was excited, energetic, hugely knowledgeable and passionate about her handsets. It made such a refreshing break from the norm. Handset manufacturers really must do more of this. They must bring their backroom design teams out more often. Not only was it a pleasure to film, it was fantastic to get a level of insight into the handset that is generally never available. And we caught it all — authorised — on camera.

We’ll be bringing you Maiko’s videos very soon.