finally, back from vegas and a week of CTIA wireless IT. this was the first conference i have been to in a long time where i wasn't a speaker or running a booth - so it was good to sit back and soak up what was going on as an outsider! now that i'm back i've had a day or so to digest the show and here are some general observations:
attendance was lower than in the past
i've been to this show for the last three years, and this was probably had the lowest attendance of the three. perhaps there were as many attendees, but certainly fewer businesses on the show floor. perhaps because there has been a shakeout of many of the smaller companies that have presented in the past (there certainly weren't as many "science fair" booths, if you know what i mean) but also a lack of presence of many of the bigger companies. notably missing with any force were nokia, ericsson, motorola, and microsoft. they were all there but with a way dialed down presence from what we've seen in previous years.
symbian kicked ass
okay, another way to say it would be symbian put a lot of marketing dollars toward this show, which was probably a smart move to start to displace palm (or is it palm one? does anyone remember the difference? that might be the worst name change since when Borland tried to change their name to Inprise) in north america, and try to hold off windows mobile 2003 from really establishing a foothold here.
but seriously, symbian executed well. their educational sessions were all well attended and informative, and their booth on the floor had a constant sea of people trying out ALL the symbian based handsets. they did a great job of bringing in their partners such as UIQ for the UIQ user interface, nokia for the series 60 and series 80 user interfaces, and sony ericsson for the official launch of the P900 handset. also interesting was a presentation by macromedia on bringing flashcast to the symbian OS. i played with the demos of this "channel based" platform and found it interesting.
deployment of location based services is still a mess
probably the most well attended, standing room only, presentation was a panel discussion on location based services sponsored by the wireless lbs challenge. there were a lot of good points bounced around, but in the end, there were a lot of annoyed developers who weren't happy about hearing that most of the operators in north america (save nextel, who has LBS for developers deployed today) won't be allowing developers to access networked based location information for another 12-24 months. this jives with operators i have talked to as well, who want to sort out all the privacy and billing issues associated with the LBS before allowing developers to have access.
the companies that will be in the forefront of pioneering such applications this year will be the ones that purchase the network wholesale from operators and manage all the billing and liability separate from the customer, or that go ahead and use other means for obtaining LBS information. an example is wherify wireless which purchases network with LBS capabilities from Sprint PCS, and takes the operator out the equation of managing the customer.
in the end, there were lots of questions about how to even satisfy the requirements of this contest, and a lot of lame suggestions about being forced to use bluetooth GPS machines and such, it's the application idea that matters, etc. the winner gets $100K, so perhaps that's incentive enough.
what's that? eric told me to read the fine print. oh. that's a $100K of navtech software licenses. well, that might do it for some folks.
smartphone designs are getting better
both the sony ericsson P900 and sierra wireless voq seemed to get a lot of attention and praise from many of the people i talked to. keeping the device small, but increasing its usefulness seems to be the message the device manufacturers are starting to present, rather than trying to stuff whatever they can into crazy designs. the P900 is 20% smaller in mass than the P800, but with more functionality, which is a good trend.
reviews coming soon: Sony Ericsson P900, Motorola MPx200
