Was Mobile World Congress Worth It?

• Commentary

• By Ben Rooney

The Fira de Barcelona will be a ghost town by the weekend as the stands from Mobile World Congress 2011 are packed away, the eight vast exhibition halls vacated and the miles and miles of cabling rolled back up. So was it worth it?

The Star of the Show: Some reports give it to the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (aka the PlayStation phone), others say it was the HTC Facebook phones. Someone claimed it was Samsung’s Galaxy S II. There was only one star at this show, and it wasn’t a phone; it was an operating system. The undoubted star was Google’s Android. It was everywhere. We have written about their clever marketing ploy, but even without that it would still have been the star. The show belonged to Google. Even the keynote given by Eric Schmidt, the sometime CEO of what used to be a search engine company, eclipsed that given by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, although that may have more to do with the paucity of Mr. Ballmer’s presentation rather than the shining erudition of Mr. Schmidt.

There is nothing we in the media like better than to talk about things like buzz, traction, excitement or mojo. Well having taken something of a beating from Facebook in recent months, Google certainly was the belle of the ball.

The Villain of the Show: Ironically for a show about communications, the communications. But patchy wi-fi is par for the course at a lot of these shows. It tanked on presentations by Google and Microsoft, among others.

The Company That Must Not Be Named: Present without actually being there, Apple doesn’t do Mobile World Congress. It doesn’t need to. It even won an award this year at the show for the iPhone 4. One of the themes at MWC this year were the scores of tablets—most of them, it must be said, utterly interchangeable. Every single one of these was competing not against each other but against the iPad. And of course Android is a direct response to iOS.

Microsoft/Nokia: This was the background chat, the opening ice-breaker to talk to someone. You heard it being talked about in the queues and the coffee shops. It came up at press conferences and in panels, but it was more like white noise or static rather than the buzz of excitement. Nokia’s timing was everything and there was a risk that the show would be overshadowed. As it happened, it wasn’t. Last Friday’s announcement of this alliance quickly faded.

Ecosystem: This was one key message from that conference that did not fade. If Nokia CEO Steven Elop deliberately wanted to get that word onto everyone’s tongue, he succeeded. While all the glamour, money and talk are in the sumptuous booths of the big handset makers and their ecosystems, there is a whole other  ecosystem, far less glamorous, far less in the news that allows the big-name stuff to happen. You could not count the number of stands offering revolutions in backhaul, fiber, or connectivity suites or the whole myriad of devices and services built off the back of that. This side of the show goes largely unreported outside of the specialist press, which brings us to …

Wither MWC?: The organizers say 2011 is a record year, more than 60,000 people from 200 countries. That would seem to suggest a pretty rosy future. But anyone remember COMDEX? That reportedly attracted more than 200,000 people, but was killed in 2004. The problem for MWC is January’s Las Vegas Consumer Electronic Show which attracted more than double the number of people at MWC. When phones were phones and consumer electronics were consumer electronics two shows, one a few weeks after the other, sort of made sense. Is that still the case? Are handset makers going to announce their tablets at CES and their phones at MWC? We will have to see. MWC2012 has already been announced. Certainly the people of Barcelona must hope the show continues. Four nights of hotels, dinners and taxis worth of cash is injected into the economy to say nothing of the employment for an army of hosts, security, cleaners, caterers and so on that make the show happen.