Bienvenue MWC!
Barcelona, beautiful, busy. Once again the gorgeous Spanish city plays host to the GSMA Mobile World Congress, an event which this year is drenched (quite literally) in new technology, new ideas and some familiar faces for good measure. For a long time I have been an advocate for "lifestyle" centric devices, for the human element to be present in technology, now more than ever we are reliant on these small hunks of plastic and metal in our pockets and there has been little in the way of innovation for our candy-bar compadres.
Being a tech-hazard myself I had the ill fated phone-in-a-pool scenario a few times too many to be aware of how valuable a lifestyle proof device would be, with a feature as simple seeming as water resistance. After all our watches have had this for years. This seems to be a big trend for mobile manufacturers. Motorola excitingly have partnered up with a new high-tech company to create the stylish and robust, water repellant devices such as their return to form Razr phone and their attempt at an Android tablet.
Nokia have managed to realise one of my most desired convergences, a 'proper' camera phone, the new c808 camera phone brings an astonishing 41mp camera sensor to an impressively packaged phone, however the decision to keep it Symbian based has potentially limited its market appeal with the bright and highly intuitive windows Lumia models being so highly regarded for speed and interface usability. iPhone 5 better have some significant UI improvements because next to this it looks completely dated.
It seems the exciting landscape of mobile technology keeps advancing at an exponential rate, to the point where there will be little need for anything other than your phone, super-computer processing power, HD audio and video, high quality cameras and blistering fast data speeds mean it wont be long before all you need is your phone, a screen and maybe a wireless keyboard.
The advancements in technology displayed at MWC don't really mean alot to the majority of people, if your not in the industry a bit of speed here, or a bit of cost-saving there doesn't necessary rock you world, but where the network technology and hardware vendors may fail to excite the average show-goer, the handset manufacturers and app developers have picked up the mantle to wow.
Google's commitment to promoting Android and it's developer community has been well received for the most part, but still garnered criticism of the platform and its future in an essentially enterprise driven marketplace. With Apple's foray into the enterprise space starting to kick off, with more and more corporate users requesting iOS devices prompting the consumer giant to help the business community make use of it's "locked down" platform. I personally have never been a fan of the platform, although it does have significant advantage over other operating systems in search and apps, it seemed a little too tech heavy for me, and not user centric. I have yet to see a device level add-on which improved this either.
The most exciting technology for me was definitely the nano-level liquid repellant technology demonstrated by P2i (the tech geniuses behind the new wave of water proof devices such as Motorola). The "beading" effect of water rolling off an otherwise completely absorbent paper towel was something completely out of a sci-fi film. The application of the technology is not only limited to electronics and paper towels either, being applied to shoes, clothing and virtually any surface you can think off. The rumor is that Apple is the next manufacturer in their sights - iPad in the pool anyone?
So in my opinion technology convergence is reaching levels of real usability - where a mobile device can truly replace the need for additional technology and withstand the tests of the average lifestyle. The new Razr's form factor was super impressive, made of Dupont carbon kevlar its strong and light, with gorilla glass and water proofed, the Windows phone interface and nokia's latest camera phone. Sandwich those all together, put in some great apps (Windows still has a long way to go) and add the HD video/audio streaming capability of the new Sony and LG models and you have a true "lifestyle" device.
Maybe until iPhone 5?