As Seen At Mobile World Congress, Day 2
It is nearly impossible to see every product spinning through the eight halls that make up the massive Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. But not for us! This event is typically a chance for the entire mobile ecosystem to gather -- mobile operators, handset manufacturers, software providers, mobile service companies, carrier equipment manufacturers and mobile operating system vendors. Most of the new technology is incremental in nature, but it's always fun to see what new ideas pop up. What fol
February 16, 2011
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Ericsson is one of the largest manufacturers of mobile operator infrastructure. One of their best ideas at Mobile World Congress was to catch new customers by creating an elaborate web. Wonder if it worked.
Research In Motion had quite an elaborate setup at Mobile World Congress. More important it was filled with mini-stands populated by all of the company's partners and developers. Dozens of them. Clearly RIM wanted to show how its Playbook will come out of the gate ready with plenty of apps.
Early on, RIM showed enterprise applications working within the Playbook environment. At Mobile World Congress, SAP was demonstrating several workflow applications, including this approval app. The idea here is to simply stamp a document with an electronic "approval," eliminating any complex routing schemes you'd see in other applications.
SAP also demonstrated a typical customer/inventory application, which included views into inventory and other supply chain mechanics, as well as getting a full glimpse of the customer.
Business intelligence functionality has been one of the more hyped enterprise-class applications being demonstrated on tablets. Most of the major BI vendors have come out with things like BI dashboards for the iPad. SAP showcased its Playbook dashboard.
Shortly before Mobile World Congress, Texas Instruments announced its OMAP 5 chip set, which it began marketing heavily. The new chips, still a long way from being available, are multi-core ARM Cortex-A15 processors running at 2 GHz (Qualcomm, by the way, announced a new version of its Snapdragon family, some of which will be quad-core, and those chips run at 2.5 GHz). It includes dedicated graphics acceleration and support for computational photography (dedicated in hardware), which will improve image processing and enhance the ability to do things like facial recognition.
LG uses Texas Instruments OMAP 4 chipset, and was demonstrating 3D video capture on its new Optimus 3D
Research In Motion, which has been boasting about the graphics and computational power of its Playbook also revealed that it was using TI's OMAP 4 chipsets.
MobiTV, which has been providing live and VOD programming on mobile platforms since 1999, demonstrated its software running on Android. Mostly MobiTV is white labeled through mobile operators, but there are also apps in the Android and iTunes stores. The cost is $7.99 per month.
MobiTV was demonstrating convergence -- the ability to shift video content between televisions (through agreements with set-top box manufacturers), phone handsets and tablets. With this, you can pause a program on the TV and continue watching it on another participating device.
VMWare MVP (Mobile Virtualization Platform) lets you virtualize Android, so that you can keep your personal apps separate from your work apps. This is the same phone. On the left is the native Android running on the phone; on the right is Android running in a mobile VM.
Nuance, makers of Dragon voice recognition, were demonstration FlexT9, which allows for several forms of content input -- from the keyboard, to using the company's T9 keyboard tracing, to a slate-like writing screen (using your finger or a stylus) and, of course, voice dictation. It supports five languages.
Nuance's FlexT9 voice input feature. One of several modes of input. This app is available for Android.
Mobile World Congress takes place at the Fira de Barcelona, a tremendous, picturesque campus that, even at its massive size, can hardly contain this growing show. This is one of the world's most magnificent event venues.
Mobile World Congress takes place at the Fira de Barcelona, a tremendous, picturesque campus that, even at its massive size, can hardly contain this growing show. This is one of the world's most magnificent event venues.
Ericsson is one of the largest manufacturers of mobile operator infrastructure. One of their best ideas at Mobile World Congress was to catch new customers by creating an elaborate web. Wonder if it worked.
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