Handsets
Nokia/Intel
Here are another couple of giants in danger of getting left behind as the mobile Internet market evolves. Nokia is still the world's biggest phone maker, and handsets like the N900 show its perfectly capable of producing competitive smartphones, but Symbian is getting old and Maemo has nothing like the widespread support of iPhone or Android.
We're still waiting to see Intel's big move into mobile phones. It teased us with a couple of phones running Moorestown - Intel's first CPU that's small and low-power enough to run a hand-held device - at CES, but it's been pretty quiet on the subject since. It will want to show why we should consider moving away from ARM-based phones.
Why have we grouped the two together? Because they're holding a joint press conference on the first day of MWC. There are rumours the Nokia won't even be launching a new handset at MWC for the first time and the two are thought to be focusing their collaboration - first announced in the middle of last year - on software. Intel has recently launched an app store for netbook and don't forget Nokia makes a netbook, so maybe the focus will be in this direction.
Handsets
Samsung and Sony Ericsson have scheduled their big press conferences on the Sunday evening before the show...at the same time. Surely not a coincidence. Samsung has been gaining market share, while Sony Ericsson has been losing it, and they'll be keen to out-do each other.
Motorola will be looking to keep the momentum going on its Android smartphone strategy, and LG has an entire pavilion at MWC 2010, of which it's the platinum sponsor. Dell, HP, Garmin-Asus and RIM will all be exhibiting at at MobileFocus Global on the Monday evening.
Operating Systems
A lot of the talk right now is about Google's Android, and with good reason, but there are a lot of other operating systems being developed. These include Nokia's Maemo, Intel's Moblin, Samsung's Bada and Palm's WebOS, and they will all want to demonstrate to developers, as much as users, why theirs the platform they should choose.
ARM
The UK chip designer will continue with its approach of showing-off partner offerings, and there are plenty of them. We will hopefully see more details of SoCs based on its multi-core Cortex A9 design, including offerings from NVIDIA, Texas Instruments and a quad-core from NEC.
Many ARM instruction set licensees are choosing not to license ARM's chip designs, however - like Qualcomm with Snapdragon and Marvell with the ironically named Armada. So ARM will be keen to showcase the unique qualities of not only its Cortex designs, but also its Mali graphics cores. We also expect to hear more about the growing closeness between ARM and GlobalFoundries.
