MWC2010 trends and ideas

I’m back from MWC 2010 and finally found some time to settle down and write a few notes about my feelings about this year’s show. Apart from the cold and rain (unusual in Barcelona), a few main points were very striking during this MWC:

All the phones manufacturers have now taken the smartphone angle and are heavily basing their strategy on Android. LG, and Motorola and 100% Android and Samsung came up with Bada, his home-cooked linux mobile which isÂ very impressive. Nokia now has a clear roadmap about Symbian evolving for decent touch-screen support and it’s now clear that maemo will not be for smartphones.
They ALL focus on the UX a lot and understood the lesson from apple – End Users want easy and smooth.
We are heading back to a device space with a homogeneous split between the device manufacturers, and this also means the slow death of Feature Phones.
Social is key. The whole Samsung Wave presentation was about its social integration, Motorola is pushing its own suite “Blur” ahead. Everyone ate MWC was talking about social address-book and social presence.
Mobile payment is finally leaping ahead with Visa for instance teaming up with Micro-SD manufacturers to embed RFID payment tags in their memory card thus trying to limit the current amount of stakeholders slowing up the project (and thus bypassing phone manufacturers and operators)
SIM Card manufacturers are struggling to protect the value in their business (Sagem adds a wifi hotspot to the SIM Card and SK telecom runs Android on a sim)