Anyone who’s anyone in the 3GSM world will be hot footing it to the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, which starts tomorrow.
Waving big shiny banners and shouting ‘look at me’ will be a slew of mobile and interactive entertainment companies who are keen to team up with telecom companies and grab a juicy slice of the growing mobile entertainment revenue stream.
In a reflection of where the market is headed, the summit will be stuffed full of speakers from big name entertainment companies like Disney, Electronic Arts, Nokia, Vodafone, Motorola, MTV, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI Music.
The mobile phone industry is desperate to come up with mass market services to entice consumers to use 3G networks, but they’ve got their work cut out, with a recent survey finding that almost 80 per cent of UK users said that mobile services are getting too complicated.
There are high hopes that Mobile TV will prove 3G’s salvation and lure in customers by the bucketful.
Keen to show off the technology’s potential, MTV Networks will be showcasing three mobile TV channels at the event, broadcasting MTV music and shows, Paramount Comedy, Nickelodeon and IFILM, a new MTV brand.
It’s all well and good having the ability to watch TV on the move, but consumers aren’t likely to enjoy trying to watch the big game on a squinty tiddler of a screen, so we can expect to see screen sizes on multimedia mobiles to grow rapidly over the coming year.
BT are also going to be at the show and are expected to launch their new broadcast digital TV to mobile service, BT Movio (formerly known as BT Livetime).
There’s certainly a lot of interest in the show, with record breaking pre-registrations and 962 companies signing up as exhibitors – a hefty 40% increase from last year.
The predicted 50,000 visitors can also be, err, thrilled by a performance from Craig David’s. Lucky them!
We’ll end with Bill Gajda, chief marketing officer for the GSM Association, in full PR mode: “As the world’s leading entertainment companies accelerate their plans to channel their content onto mobile devices, there is no better place to meet and forge partnerships with the world’s buyers of that content – the global operator community – than at the 3GSM World Congress.”
According to a new report, future growth in the Japanese mobile market is to be focused on the only market segment yet to reach 100% saturation: the under 14s and over 55s.
The biggest growth, however, comes from the 55-65 age group, with 1.62 million new customers expected in 2006.
Blended ARPU is expected to continue sliding from $58 pcm in 2005 to $57 pcm by 2007 but this should be compensated by data ARPU which is predicted to rise from $15 pcm to $17 pcm over the same period, thanks to the growth of content market.
T-Mobile was told to see the headmaster and returned with a derrier rouge after making exaggerated claims about its “web’n’walk” mobile Internet service.In a wave of PR-driven hyperbole 
T-Mobile had a valiant stab at a defence, arguing that their advert was all about making the distinction between Ye Olde Crappe WAP and their new, full Internet-access, web’n’walk service, adding that they had included the line, “subject to coverage”.
To the sound of a salvo of slapped wrists, the statement concluded that the ad, “was misleading because readers were likely to interpret the claim to refer to geographical network coverage. We told T-Mobile to avoid making such unconditional claims in future advertising.”
Sony Ericsson have announced their new M600 handset, a tri-band (900/1800/1900 plus UMTS 2100 for 3G data outside the US) jobbie, with Symbian OS 9.1 and UIQ 3.0 operating systems.
Touted as a “fully-specified email tool and mobile phone”, the handset offers true multitasking, so a user can, for example, browse the Internet while chatting away on the phone.
For road warriors and shuffling suits, there’s the facility to read and edit PowerPoint, Word and Excel documents and Adobe PDF files on the move, with the popular Opera 8 browser provided for surfing the Internet.
In line with its business focus, there’s no built in camera, and Wi-Fi is an unfortunate omission too.
If you’ve owned a few digital cameras or PDAs and switched brands a couple of times over the years, you’ll probably already have a formidable collection of non-compatible memory cards wasting away in your drawer.
Much as we hate to give any kudos to yet another memory card format, that’s a mighty impressive capacity and offers enough storage space to turn mobile phones into fully fledged, iPod-worrying MP3 players.
It’s been spluttering and wheezing in its sick bed for what seems like an eternity, but the latest figures from research firm IDC confirm that the prognosis isn’t good for the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
Although a bright Christmas period saw sales grow 37.6% over Q3, the trend remains resolutely downward, with the declining market segment driving PDAs into a market niche.
But don’t go ordering flowers for the PDA funeral quite yet, as IDC research analyst Ramon Llamas insists that it’s not all over for the PDA market, with plenty of smaller vendors remaining committed to a more niche PDA market.
With Palm winding down its PDA business and concentrating on its Treo smartphone range, Nelson argues that Palm will have difficulty competing against deep-pocketed rivals like Dell and HP who are currently ploughing big R&D budgets into similar products.
BBC World have been busy bunnies of late, signing distribution deals all over the globe.
The video streams include the adverts that would be shown if BBC World were being shown on the TV in the region. As yet, BBC World aren’t charging their advertisers any extra to splash them on mobile screens – they’re seeing it as added value for them
In the 3/Hutchinson Australia deal, the subscribers are being asked to pay Au$4/month for unlimited access, Au$2/day or Au$0.50/two minutes.
Four months after releasing their first iTunes-enabled mobile phone, the disappointing Motorola ROKR E1, Motorola have had another stab at creating the perfect music phone.
The biggest complaint was the laughably feeble memory on the ROKR that could only hold a maximum of 100 iTunes songs – regardless of memory capacity – and a treacle-slow song transfer rate.
In a flurry of arty waffle, Steve Lalla, vice president and general manager for mass-market products at Motorola, explained that the, “L7 is really in what we call our ‘self-expression portfolio,’ where design and style is the key premise behind the product”.
A week ahead of its scheduled launch, smartphone bigwigs i-mate have revealed details of their latest model, the JAMin.
Switching from a 416 MHz Intel processor to a 200 MHz TI processor (we know it sounds like it must be slower but they’re not directly comparable), i-mate have stuck with the JAM form factor, adding a different button layout and twice the ROM.
Also known as the HTC Prophet (and O2 XDA Neo), the phone shouldn’t stir it up in the pocket department, measuring a compact 10.8 x 5.8 x 1.8cm and weighing 150g. Memory expansion is taken care of courtesy of a SD IO slot