Chinese democracy
While Apple can take much of the blame for the precarious position in which Nokia finds itself in the high-end smartphone market, the threat is no less at the other end of the market.
As Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said in his now famous, and almost certainly deliberately leaked (I asked Engadget about that, but they were tight-lipped), Burning Platform memo: Nokia isn't just getting owned at the top end, Chinese manufacturers are able to produce mass-market phones more efficiently and are getting increasingly aggressive with their own brands.
Mobile infrastructure giant Huawei hurled money at this year's show. Not only was it the main sponsor, but it supplemented its large stand with what looked like an aircraft hangar just to give its mates somewhere to hang out. On top of that it launched some Android smartphones and tablets and looks set to ramp-up its branded device operations.
Just over from Huawei's stand was an even bigger one by fellow Chinese telco equipment giant ZTE. On the opening day of the show ZTE had launched the Skate 4.3 inch Gingerbread smartphone with NFC capability. Again, where ZTE has previously been more of a white-label phone maker (for example the Orange San Francisco), it is now looking to go it alone in much the same way HTC did a few years ago.
Android itself had a massive presence at the show. While our back-to-back schedule didn't allow us the opportunity to visit its stand, it was the talk of the show thanks to features like a great big slide. There was also some great field marketing, including the allocation of uniquely customised Android badges to all its partners. Apparently people were trading them in order to have as complete a set as possible. Yes, I know.
As far as MWC went, Android is the only mobile platform. There were no WP7 handsets launched, while the pre-show BlackBerry and HP launches were largely forgotten. Those two have really got their work cut out to avoid being relegated to niche player status.
So while MWC 2011 was an utter nightmare for many of the companies that used to dominate show, for the market on the whole it was very positive. The show was rammed every day, and the vibe was that this was the show that marked the changing of the guard from the old tech semi-monopolists to a much more diverse, vibrant and truly competitive community of lean, mean mobile machines.
Yes, Qualcomm is the dominant mobile chip player, but it constantly has to persuade its partners not to go with TI, or Freescale, or Marvell, or new kid on the block NVIDIA. Even ARM can't get too complacent, with MIPS heralding Android as the opportunity it needs to persuade OEMs to give its alternative architecture a try, which it insists is much lower power yet than ARM.
The OEM market is savagely competitive, with innovation so rapid that even six month old handsets are starting to look tired and obsolete. The dominance of Android is a bit of a concern, but we were reminded that OEMs and operators are not obliged to pre-install Google apps such as Maps and Gmail. So it's good news all round unless you're Nokia, or Intel, or Microsoft, or complacent.
