Desperate measures
I'm going to arrive in Barcelona in the middle of the afternoon of 13 February, technically the day before Mobile World Congress starts, so that will give me some time to get settled in, set up my workstation, get an early night, etc.
Yeah, right.
Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson have all sought to out-do each other and have all scheduled press events on the Sunday evening at the same time. My feeling is that SE will launch the Xperia Play and Samsung will definitely launch the successor to the Galaxy S - see trailer below.
What Nokia has to announce I'm less sure about. It didn't even launch a product at MWC 2010, but it did announce the creation of the MeeGo mobile platform in partnership with Intel.
For me, the most significant announcement would be the launch of Nokia's first MeeGo handset - doubly so if it contains an Intel chip. But what would possibly get even more attention would be if Nokia launched a phone based on a third-party platform.
The reason this would be such a big deal is not just that Nokia has so far resisted the charms of Android and Windows Phone 7, but that it has made it clear what a bad idea it thinks following the herd would be.
The former head of Nokia's smartphone division - Anssi Vanjoki - famously equated the adoption of Android to peeing in your pants for warmth; the initial relief is soon followed by a worse problem. In this case, the metaphorical frozen piss is an inability to differentiate yourself from your competitors, or capitalize on lucrative services such as app stores and location-based services.
This reality is undeniable. I've reviewed a few Android phones and they're fundamentally all the same. Yes the industrial design varies and you get go-faster stripes like HTC Sense, but the core is completely defined by Google, as are the vast majority of the services you use.
While Samsung, HTC, Moto, LG and SE are all shifting a fair few Android phones, they must be having to keep their margins pretty tight in order to compete with each other, and I suspect Google will be a far greater beneficiary of all those sales than the OEMs. The main thing they've got out of Android is the ability to compete with the phenomenon that is Apple.
