There honestly were not many highlights to the Mobile World Congress show. For those who have not been to the Barcelona show, it is really for equipment makers who want to sell, and buyers who need new devices and services, to get together, share ideas and do business. So it’s never too surprising when nothing stands out as breathtakingly new.
However walking the halls there are a handful of themes which seem to come through strongly, the fact that everyone is talking about 4G and that many base station suppliers, or suppliers of software which works with 4G base stations or devices, were on show. 4G is going to change the nature of wireless data delivery, and that in turn is going to make video, our main and pet topic, easier to deliver in a wider variety of ways, but we are a long way off from when that is possible, so for the time being Faultline is more interested in what’s possible to deliver now.
Which leaves us with perhaps two themes from the show which stood out, the juggling of position between the various operating systems which have emerged as contenders for a new generation of smart phones, and the manner in which maps, and specifically local search, is being used to in that battle.
The earliest announcement at the show was the merger of the Nokia and Intel Linux variants, Maemo from Nokia and Moblin from Intel, which we knew from last year were destined to be one and the same. Nokia has just had one battle with its developers over the SDK for Maemo, where it had to find a bridge for a previous generation of developer, using yet another tool it had purchased, to work with Maemo. Now it has to drag that entire community, much of it we suspect Scandinavian and Northern European, to yet another platform, after Maemo managed to appear on just one smart phone, the N900. The N900 has sold exceptionally well for Nokia, even before it managed to claim a number of operator deals in Europe, but it has yet to find a US partner. So how are the owners of that phone going to feel, now that the platform has finally been made to work with the Nokia Ovi services which were developed for Symbian, and it has to begin moving on already.
The new version of the merged operating system will be called Meego, and it is set to launch in the second quarter with MeeGo devices down the road a bit. Although Maemo began life as an OS for Mobile Internet Tablets, in the N900, Nokia has moved it to encompass smart phones as well, and at Mobile World Congress, it was talking about increasing game support for the power of the 1 GHz processor in the N900, and getting more and more Ovi content ready for it.
But really this merged operating system has been aimed just as much back as its heartland of pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets and connected TVs and in-vehicle systems as much as at pure smartphones. Clearly it being just an operating system, it can run on multiple chips with different power and battery requirements and at least one of these platforms will come from Intel.
MeeGo will still offer the Qt application development environment which came out of Nokia’s earlier acquisition of Trolltech, which was the system which caused so much developer unrest previously, when developers were unsure of whether it had a future. The Meego OS will be able to reach both Nokia’s Ovi Store and Intel AppUp Center, which doesn’t mean that anyone will offer both, though they might, but that devices might offer either.
MeeGo will be hosted by the Linux Foundation and governed under the open source development model. But will this be enough?
Android may not be liked, and Google may have drawn a lot of criticism from operators and operator friendly media, specifically at the MWC Keynote speech given by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, but it is now shipping 60,000 devices a day. Even if it flattens out at that rate, it would come close to overtaking Apple, at a rate of 5.4 million a quarter and 21 million devices a year. But if the show is anything to go by, it will not flatten out at that rate. At the show there were more Android phones launched than any other kind of handset, from Motorola, Acer, Sony Ericsson, HTC, from LG, from Samsung, from Garmin ASUS and even from Vodafone. These are reaching new parts of the world (like China and Korea) and will make up more and more of the choices available to consumers.
We have said a well branded, truly open OS was going to gain favor, and it has, but how much room does that leave for MeeGo to begin establishing itself from here on in. We have the Apple OS, which is only for itself, which will certainly survive, at least in the medium term. We have Symbian, hanging on by a thread but installed on more smartphones than any other operating system, we have a potentially dying Microsoft Windows Mobile base, which has been beefed up this week, and other Linux offerings, including those from the LiMo foundation. We even have the RIM and Palm platforms, so there are way too many operating platforms for them all to survive, and as big as they are we’re not sure that Nokia can support two of its own, and yet ignore the fastest growing of them in Android, for much longer, and still keep growing market share. Nokia does not even embrace LiMo, which many operators at the congress said they planned to use for their own brand efforts, at least alongside Android.
Realistically Nokia has a major problem and it’s about to hit and hit hard. Its phones are rubbish. No-one at Mobile World Congress would happily bring out a Nokia and make a call on it or look up something on the internet. There is something about pulling out a stylus or touching an icon with your finger three or four times on an unresponsive resistive screen, while the phone completely ignores you, that makes the N900, the N97 and all the other Nokia revolutionary phones, look tame. To the cognoscenti at MWC it would have simply been an embarrassment. Nokia is the last to embrace capacitive screens and gesture touch controls, it will be the last to embrace Android and in the end a company that needs to be first at everything can’t have too many lasts and remain in front.
Nokia, in our given field of video, has been saying for at least four years that it will not embrace any mobile TV architecture other than DVB-H. But murmurs at the show place Nokia finally thinking of embracing the Chinese CMMB standard, or risk losing out on market share in China, and also to begin looking at ISDB-T so that the entire South American sub-continent is not suddenly pushed beyond its grasp. But of course, in both markets, it will be last. Ironically enough it is also threatening to be the last handset maker to produce a cheap DVB-H phone, instead forcing the handful of DVB-H installations around the world to take its N97 class of devices, for their top 1% to 5% of customers, and making these the only DVB-H phone, that is until it launched the €155 5330 last October, which it is still yet to deliver globally.
On the one hand ZTE is about to launch a cheap DVB-H phone, which we suspect will be around the $100 mark in reasonable volumes, which though not shown at the show, had been seen by people there. And on the other we could see the Motorola MT710 which supports CMMB, launched as an Ophone for China Mobile (yet another Android derivative). If troubled Motorola is able to bring one of these to market then it cannot be beyond Nokia.
What Nokia has instead of great phones which support all the standards are new ‘standards’ like Meego, and a great services story in Ovi.
But it has been so slow to get Ovi off the ground, that like its Navteq subsidiary, it appears to be a hidden asset. Ask anyone at the show what they think of Ovi and they say they have not used it. And when Nokia ships over 100 million phones in a quarter, to tell us just prior to the show that 1 million people have downloaded Nokia Maps in a week, when it finally got around to giving it away for free on its key devices, is such a drop in the ocean. Nokia should be seeing huge surges in games, its file sharing services, its social network, music tracks, maps and applications right across the board, but instead the weak UI, so embedded in the old Nokia menuing systems of the past, makes it tough to use any of the world class services it has built under the Ovi brand.
It has more cloud that Google, but Google has left it behind in UI design. We had a chat with The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) which offers software for prototyping and building new phone UIs, and it was so utterly disdainful of Nokia (it gets much of its work from Samsung). While TAT did not want to be quoted directly you could see the team’s frustration in trying to deal with the worlds largest handset maker, on its doorstep. Nokia cannot see that it is last at everything, because, like Microsoft before it (two dominant market leaders) it feels it has to invent or own an innovation and if it doesn’t, it must crush it.
But if it has finally released its Nokia Maps for free, along with turn by turn driving instructions, all delivered with the unerring accuracy of GPS, Nokia should surely expect to displace a huge number of Garmin and Tom Tom personal navigation devices. You would think so wouldn’t you. Well not if you go to Garmin’s stand and look at the Garmin Asus A50 phone, which was launched at the show, somewhat late, as an Android device. It’s turn by turn instructions are activated by gesture controls, are self evident and can be demonstrated in about 30 seconds. The Nokia Maps download experience alone, and the fact that in the past you were persistently asked if you wanted to a) download maps and b) how were you paying for them, has put many people off the now free service.
We tested the Garmin phone by asking it to navigate to various press conferences around Barcelona, and it managed it fine. Which is a real testimony to the maps it uses. What are they we asked? Navteq maps from Nokia.
So if you want really accurate local mapping, the best way is to take a phone made by a personal navigation device vendor, which uses the legendary Navteq data, now belonging to Nokia. What about Google maps? Well what about it. It is an open secret outside of the US that Google Maps just don’t work. They don’t have the level of detail needed to find a building, and some of the street names are suspect or missing. You certainly can’t even navigate reliably a mile away from where you are at the MWC using Google Maps.
And that brings us to the other main theme that is emerging, the fight over maps or rather over local search. Maps are more important than consumers realize, but have been the focus of the mobile service industry for some time. It was obvious to Nokia that Navteq was of huge value, over two years ago when it stumped up $8 billion for the company.
Nokia has had to miss out on what it thought was a great opportunity to get consumers to pay directly for its maps and in effect wasted that huge two year head start. But it is not turn by turn directions that are the gold mine, it is the future of Yellow pages class activity everywhere in the form of local search.
Nokia doesn’t have its own search engine, so it has to hide local search behind Google. Search for restaurants and it will use Google. Search for local restaurants and it will default to detailed data of nearby listings (taking your location from your GPS) and offer touch to call. All of this data is part of what Navteq does.
Touch to call, and showing you the menu, then providing you with pedestrian or driving turn by turn instructions in lots of language, all while making the UI ease of use, is perhaps what will dictate who sells the next few hundred million smart phones, and by this show’s experience, that lets out Google, and opens the door to more nimble movers than Nokia, but with its own data. On Apple phones there are apps which use both Google Maps and Navteq.
One of the other players is Microsoft, and it completely rejuvenated its mobile operating systems hopes by the introduction of Windows Phone 7 Series at the show, more a replacement than an upgrade to Windows Mobile, embracing gesture touch controls, and pushing its own Xbox and Zune brands as functions within the device (see separate story). It had a swathe of US and European operators backing the new OS and two more things up its locker. Firstly it has been implemented on at least two other chips, on the new Texas Instruments OMAP 4, also unveiled at the show, but perhaps more importantly on the Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. Snapdragon is the way for Windows Phone 7 to find its way onto iPad class devices as well as any other kind of device which becomes popular over the next two years, such as ebook readers and Smartbooks.
As if to underline how important it is for handset vendors to play in this side of the market, even Sony Ericsson and TeleCommunication Systems, (TCS) subsidiary Network in Motion, jointly announced turn-by-turn navigation and local search on the new Sony Ericsson Aspen smartphone using the Gokivo Navigator application. This runs under Windows anyway and the Gokivo Navigator is free to all Sony Ericsson Aspen for the first 30 days, which is a tactic Nokia tried and it failed.
So here we have an example of Nokia, once suspicious of Microsoft, first befriending it with software initiatives conducted over the past two years (PlayReady and Silverlight), and now trying to steal its girlfriend (in the form of Intel) with the lure of a jointly owned operating system. Meanwhile, although best of enemies, Qualcomm and Nokia have made up, clearly Qualcomm is on nickname terms with the Android and Chrome teams at Google, it yet still has time to start a dalliance with Microsoft which could enable Windows Phone 7 on multiple ARM device formats.
But Microsoft is not just fighting back with a new Windows Mobile, it has incorporated its Bing search engine into the process and will use Nokia owned Navteq data in a new local search capability, in one step catching up, at least technically, with many Android design teams who have eschewed Google Maps.
There are many possible futures for the mobile industry and there are some alarming potential outcomes. Nokia may realize the error of its ways and take up touch gesture commands and capacitive screens, and revolutionize its UI by copying Apple and Google. Apple could always stumble over advertising and local search, Facebook might enter the phone market with its own design of on-board platform, replacing all the new ‘integrated and merged’ social network innovations just out on phones. Google might stop talking about open access for long enough to do enough backroom research on maps outside of the US. New handset makers may stop defaulting to Google platforms, and may seriously consider Windows Phone 7, the first mobile operating system the company has actually written from scratch. Operators everywhere may follow Vodafone’s lead and just take LiMo for the bulk of their smart handsets, simply because it doesn’t come with strings attached.
Each of the players that make Mobile World Congress interesting, if not vital, may find themselves strong in only one or two aspects of mobility, but not perhaps across the board, until platforms stabilize. But of course when 3G platforms are stable, 4G will be upon us and there will be so much more that you can do with a phone so the war will not be won yet awhile.