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CES Wrap Up: All's Quiet On The Mobile Front

This year's CES was exceptionally quiet with respect to new mobile technology. The two biggest announcements of the week came from Sprint and Yahoo, and neither was all that exciting. The one refrain I heard over and over all week long: Wait for CTIA.

Both announcements came early in the week. Sprint confirmed that it is moving forward with the Xohm WiMax network and Yahoo introduced the latest version of its mobile search and content platform, Yahoo Go.

Sprint needed to come forward and make this public commitment to WiMax. Rumors and reports have been swirling around the Internet about WiMax's future at Sprint. Some have included a possible sale of the WiMax division. From my perspective, this was something Sprint could not do, as it would leave it without a 4G strategy. As good as it is that Sprint is moving forward and seemingly on schedule, it is disappointing to hear from Sprint that it is not going to equip mobile phones -- not even smartphones -- with WiMax compatibility. Instead, it is going to focus on other computing platforms such as the OQO model 02 and wireless broadband cards for laptops. I realize Sprint is attempting something massive here and needs to take baby steps, but a bigger vision from the onset would be nice.

As for Yahoo, my colleague Stephen Wellman summed up my thoughts nearly exactly:

I don't see how anyone can really consider Yahoo's announcements this week to be remotely strategic. Yahoo isn't pulling Google onto its preferred playing field (not that Yahoo seems to have a field at which it can outperform Google these days). Yahoo's news this week is nothing but a set of copy-cat moves as the perennial second-place search company desperately tries to keep up with Google.

Yahoo Go 3.0 is a nice upgrade over Yahoo Go 2.0, but, based on my experience with it today, it's still a mobile widget that's slower than it should be. Accessing e-mail is slow, as is updating news feeds. It's a nice platform, but I don't think it can hope to compete with Google's existing applications, or the coming onslaught of Google Android.

Hear, hear.

Yahoo has some mobile services, but doesn't compete with Google at all. 2007 was a breakthrough year for Google on the mobile front. Yahoo seems to have spent all of 2007 watching Google pull further ahead. Sure, Yahoo Go 3.0 is a nice step, but it's not a big enough step to get it back into the race with Google. It would appear that Yahoo has conceded the mobile market to Google without a fight.

Of all the vendors I met all week, most had nothing new to show me. Many of them said, however, wait for CTIA, we'll have something then. That's three months from now.

I can hardly wait.

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