3GSM Afterwrap

Published by Rudy De Waele February 20th, 2006 in Uncategorized

It took me a couple of days to be able to digest the whole event with it’s many cocktails and parties surrounding. The best part for me were the many wonderfull people I met behind the companies, projects and blogs.

Apart from the fact that (finally) more people start noticing that there are nearly NO women working in mobile - just check for yourself here, there weren’t nearly NO American carriers or European operators present at 3GSM. Does this mean they will concentrate again on their core business or wasn’t there anything interesting to hype-up as mobile music did last year?

I haven’t seen any mindblowing stuff during the show, neither Yahoo or Google, but I noticed some interesting smaller projects and developments and there was some interesting news sometimes overlooked or who didn’t make it to the headlines…

Despite the enormous advertising effort of Motorola in the city (nearly no advertising boards were overlooked) not to be neglected as a mobile brand, none of their phones were mentioned in the Infosync’s Top Ten phones of the 3GSM Congress, the winner went to to the Sony Ericsson W950i, definately promising and mini-revolutionary design-wise but we’ll have to wait until Q3 of 2006 to see it on the market.

We could notice that (obviously) Microsoft is putting all its efforts to keep track with the pace of other mobile OS but to me the real leap ahead comes from Symbian. Last year still in a somehow hesitating position, it becomes clear that Symbian is the way to go to operate smart mobile devices. The anouncement of Nokia and Vodafone to work together to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform is very significant.

Next to DoCoMo’s stand, S60 stand was one of my favourites. David showed me one of the most compelling prototype demo’s I have seen during the event: Music Guru, a conceptual prototype of a next generation 3G/PC music player, developed jointly by Vodafone Group R&D, MusicStrands and Adobe, promises anything you could ever imagine of social music projects such as last.fm or Pandora going mobile.

One of my personal favourites stays Minfizz who now created their Minifizz Popp’s, a beautifully designed avatar & looks builder for teenage girls to create their own avatars (mobile) online and save it as a wallpaper on their phone; on top including the possibility to create small blog-diaries to add emotional value to their avatars. The wet dream business model for operators?

But the demo I have been expecting for months now came from Berliner connection Markus Angermeier who showed me how powerfull Plazes will be on the mobile. For the insiders, some screenshots can be found on Felix Petersen’s Flickr stream.

(through Fred Bornholz blog)

And then the people! Mobile Sunday was so much fun and a perfect aperitif to what was yet to come. Some pictures can be found at Martin’s blog. The Mobilists gathering was too short for me to talk to everybody I would have liked to, so I suggest next time we’ll make it a longer event There seem to be quite some pictures of the evening circulating online, if you have some please suggest your link here so we can all share them. A nice photoshoot session of the evening has been uploaded to Flickr by Josep Ganyet. Thanks to all the mobilists and invitees for coming, I had a great time, I hope you had one too. And thanks also to Kelly Goto, Lisa and the people from Gotomedia for supporting this event. Many thanks to Russell Buckley for his continuous support of the gathering idea.

And final note to the best moblogger in town: without no doubt Kosmar, just check for yourself his impressive and most original collection of his 3GSM impressions here.