It’s nearly time for Mobile World Congress, a show that provides a chance to catch up on the latest mobile solutions, as well as feast on the best tapas and sangria Barcelona has to offer (along with 100,000 of our closest colleagues). But while it’s a show that highlights the latest and greatest in mobile technology, it sometimes starts with a whimper. The show was slow to migrate from a paper-based registration to a mobile pass, and while it made the transition a few years ago, the official app seems to get poor reviews, as the login process is still challenging and seemingly unrelated to the Web-based registration process. Anyway, moving on from this issue, and assuming the app will let us into the actual show, the below are a few highlights of what we expect to see.
It’s still a phone show at its heart
Mobile World Congress has expanded its scope over the past few years, but the headlines are usually still about new phone launches. Samsung will be launching the Galaxy S9, which is expected to be the big news in the handset market… but it will hardly be the only news. While LG may have delayed its next big launch, there are still expectations that it will announce a V30 enhancement. And a slew of other vendors, including Sony, Huawei (remember, the third largest handset OEM worldwide), and Alcatel will also be making noise. And let’s not forget Nokia, which had a surprise hit last year with the retro 3310 bar phone. This year, the OEM needs to up its game with some pretty slick smartphones if it hopes to make a comeback. But the show can also be somewhat unforgiving for some vendors, reminding us of how far some of them have fallen and scratching our heads as to why they are still trying to succeed in this space. This can sometimes mean a tiny little booth, compared to previous years, or worse, a large floor space with not much to show.
IoT takes over
While handsets provide the shiny new toys that attendees come to gawk at, the Internet of Things provides the chance to show off just how wide-reaching wireless can become. And when we say “wireless” we do, of course, mean the next generation of cellular, 5G. With some concerns about how to make the business model work in a smartphone-centric world (see blog: In Search of a 5G Business Need), vendors showing off the latest concepts for the Internet of (cellular) Things will have the carriers’ attention. We can expect to see a wide range of new concepts, promising far more than simply throwing a cellular modem into a video camera, or “redundancy/backup” justifications for that one time of the year when your broadband connection fails.
Adding more Smarts to the City
Somewhere down the road to the Internet of Things, you suddenly discover that you’ve entered a Smart City, and Mobile World Congress is no exception. For the past few years there has been a GSMA-managed Smart City demonstration highlighting everything from connected trashcans to the operational control infrastructure necessary to make all of this work. While Smart City is already become a rather worn and overhyped category, Barcelona is a city that can get away with the demonstration as it has long been a leading example of Smart City implementations.
Electric everything
The mobility part of “mobile” can be expected to make its presence known, and we can expect to see the occasional car, used to highlight, yes, you’ve guessed it, 5G implementations. To date, the big news in cars has been the move towards electric vehicles (EVs) and Connected Cars (the addition of connectivity into traditional vehicles), which have left us feeling a little underwhelmed. Hopefully this year, there will be better examples of how 5G can make the car a connected mobility space, rather than just trying to find a compromise between Internet connectivity, while still maintaining the car company’s core money makers such as antiquated mapping solutions (hint, car companies...give us access to Google Maps and Waze please!).
And a little bit of everything else
Virtual reality will be a highlight, powered (of course!) by 5G rather than a more mundane connectivity solution, but it will be the pockets of unusual products that we are mostly hoping to scope out. And of course, we should expect to see some voice assistants. These were the big news at CES (for the second year running) and while they are, in some ways, a direct competitor to the smartphone’s dominant position with the consumer, there will be many examples of how the two technologies can come back together in a cohesive singular solution.
We’ll be providing an update on what we see during the show – so stay tuned!