KEY POINTS:
I think the mobile industry deserves some credit as its annual industry showcase in Barcelona winds up for another year. The arrival of Apple's iPhone last year has forced everyone in the industry to improve their game and hardware design has improved as a result.
There are still very few phones that match the user interface of the iPhone, but useability is now the industry's focus and phones are packed with more features than ever before. Here are a few of the trends that emerged from the show...
HSPA proliferates
There's a large number of new devices supporting the high-speed packet access standard for mobile broadband allowing maximum data download speeds of up to 7.2Mbps (megabits per second).
Many of them also feature support for HSUPA, a technology that boosts the upload link capacity of mobile networks making it easier to send content to the internet. As things like mobile social networking and video-sharing starts to become popular, the upload speed starts to pay off.
Here at the Mobile World Congress I saw trials of so-called Long Term Evolution mobile technology by Swedish telecoms equipment maker Ericsson offering download speeds at up to 25Mbps. Using MIMO antenna, the speed is doubled to 50Mbps and ultimately, LTE is achieving download speeds of 100Mbps and above in the lab.
Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo has put in an order for LTE gear, one of the first operators in the world to do so. The technology is in its very early stages, and there are no handsets yet that work with the high-speed data service.
But it will begin to see the light of day in the next few years and promises to change the face of mobile broadband. In the Ericsson demo, I watched a 10MB file downloaded in 10 seconds.
The big issues ahead of LTE's adoption involve operators getting access to radio spectrum suitable to run the services and there will need to be a restructuring of the charging for mobile data as people start to suck down content at high speed. All you can eat data is the only realistic prospect in an LTE world.
Built-in GPS
Many of the new high-end phones have GPS built in, a trend kicked off by Nokia with its N95 phone. Now we have a range of map providers developing mapping for mobile phones and I heard around the traps at the Mobile World Congress that New Zealand has just been mapped in better detail for the Nokia handset maps - the versions available for the N95 to date covering our part of the world haven't been great, so any improvements would be welcomed.
Assisted GPS is also becoming increasingly common. This system allows the phone to talk to mobile base stations in the area to get a geographical fix much quicker than with unassisted GPS units, which often take several minutes to communicate with the satellites.
A-GPS uses a bit of data to get the information for the mobile user but as location-based services come into play, it will be appreciated for its convenience.
Geo-tagging
I first came across this feature in Navman's high-end in-car GPS system, which lets you take a photo through your windscreen with the built-in digital camera and tag the photo with the coordinates of the location where it was taken.
You can then upload the photos to the Flickr photo-sharing service. See a geo-tagged photo on Flickr you like - download it to the Navman unit and it will automatically direct you to its location on the map. Now geo-tagging is taking off as a feature on mobile phones equipped with GPS modules. The possibilities here are great when geo-tagging is combined with Google Maps, Flickr and the like.
FM transmitters
For years the iPod, with the Griffin (no relation) iTrip was the best answer to piping your digital music through your car stereo wirelessly. Now mobile phones are increasingly carrying out that function as FM transmitters are built into them.
It means music phones become the default source of music in the car or even at home where your home stereo will pick up the transmitted feed. I'm still in favour of connecting my music player to my stereo using a cable to get better quality audio, but the convenience of wireless transmission, particularly in the car for music and podcast playback can't be denied.
Flash memory upgrades
The standard for music phones is now 8GB of onboard storage and the Nokia N96 features 16GB which within a year will become the standard - the new iPhone is already there.
Once we get to that sort of capacity, the mobile actually has enough storage to hold a couple of full-length movies and a large collection of music. Removable flash cards, which are useful for transferring files quickly, but are generally still expensive add-ons, become less of a necessity in the 16GB world.
Bluetooth advertising
A neat service I saw in commercial use on the streets of Barcelona involves content being pushed out to the Bluetooth-equipped mobile phones of passers-by.
This example in particular featured a trailer for Sylvester Stallone's new Rambo movie. Using Bluetooth, mobile owners can stream a trailer for the movie while they wait for the bus or sit at a cafe near the Bluetooth transmitter. This is just the tip of the iceberg for mobile advertising services and may finally make Bluetooth worth having in your phone for other than using a wireless headset.
Peter Griffin attended the Mobile World Congress as a guest of Ericsson.
