With a new venue, La Fira Barcelona, and more than 50,000 attendees, this year’s 3GSM World Congress combined old and new in a splendid way-and showed once again that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The industry picked up a few new acronyms since last year (because we didn’t have enough, it seems). Whereas last year’s were HSDPA and HSUPA, this year’s acronyms were HSODA, UMA and LTE. The O in HSODA stands for OFDM, or so a nice Nortel Networks Ltd. executive said. But the industry instead is talking about LTE, or long-term evolution, when it talks about the next-generation technology. You got that? We’re going to LTE so we don’t have to keep changing the acronyms from 3G to 4G to 7G. It’s just going to be LTE! I hope that sticks, but I don’t know if an industry that names EVERYTHING with a ridiculously long combination of letters and numbers can just stick to three little letters when discussing technology paths.
The next “new” I found fascinating was Texas Instruments Inc.’s demonstration of its OMAP 3 chip architecture. (And that’s pretty amazing once you realize that chips are usually a relatively dry topic in this business.) But TI’s chief executive officer, Rich Templeton, showed Terminator 2 Judgment Day on a big screen using the OMAP chip. TI said people eventually will be able to download high-definition movies and watch them on HD monitors and retain the HD quality, all on their phones. In other words, the handset becomes the computer.
The other “new” theme was the new carriers and who they’d be; Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and the cable companies.
What hasn’t changed? Well, BenQ Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. both said they plan to deliver the world’s first HSDPA handset-and big surprise, no one yet has a handset commercially available.
Partnerships are still a great way to grow your business, and Nokia Corp.’s CDMA partnership with Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. definitely will be interesting to watch. (Look to see who supplies the chips. I’m betting Qualcomm Inc. finally gets Nokia’s business, but no one has said so officially.) BenQ also talked about merging with Siemens’ handset business. BenQ’s CEO explained it this way-square meets round, or “squound.” (Another thing that never changes: Someone talks a CEO into saying something silly to try to get a point across!)
And everything is converging or integrating with everything else so customers can access whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want.
And the final thing that never changes: booth babes and tired feet.
