MWC – More Wonderful Chips?

It is that time of year again when those more mobile Infernals get excited about the impending arrival of Mobile World Congress. This is the portable device world’s pilgrimage to Barcelona to broker deals, soak in Sangria and get their retainers worth from their internal PRs and agency staff. We will have a couple of Infernals on the ground in Barcelona who will be tweeting about the different things they see so be sure to tune in (or is that twune in? – I feel another blog post coming on about Twitter vernacular) but that isn’t the subject of this post. What I am asking is, what do you think we will see this year?

This year I am expecting that most of the coverage will be around the standard themes of the Google operating system, or the GPhone, and who/ what will be the next iPhone “killer” and possibly a few concept phones from the Far East or a Scandinavian rubber company. Every year this seems to capture the imagination of the UK and EMEA tech press and has been one that I have followed closely. As much of this conversation has already been bleated about at the first major (some may argue only) gadget show of the year, CES, what is going to interest me from this year’s mobile phone fête is what is going on under the hood.

With the rise of something called the mobile internet (not sure if you will have heard of it) chip manufacturers have been doing some really amazing things. Mobile phones now have email and web surfing at speeds that are comparable to, and sometimes exceeding, some wifi enabled laptops while working at a fraction of the voltage of a lap bound PC. With mobile chipsets now taking on a Moore-esque logarithmic growth in speed, it will be interesting to see what comes out of MWC this year and indeed whether mobile manufacturers will sound a warning on reaching their limitations. What mobile murmurs will we hear from Cataluña this year? I would be interested in your thoughts….

Matt