3GSM: Picks of Day 1

Jouni on the right and me on the left

NTT DOCOMO mobile art

So many things to see at the congress and so many interesting discussions that it´s easy to loose track if you don't take notes. Here are my picks of the day:

As promissed on their blog, some of the bloggers of s60.com are in Barcelona for the week and I had the luck to talk to Jouni Juntunen, aka MKTMAN at the s60 booth (picture 1). Great discussions on S60 features (of course), Nokia policy towards blogging, the competing products and great demos at the booth.

This is the third year in a row I visited the Kineto booth who work on the integration of cellular and Wifi. The technology is called UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) and basically replaces the GSM air interface layer with Wifi. This year they seem closer than ever to reaching their goal as a number of mobile phone manufacturers such as Nokia have announced GSM/UMTS/Wifi phones. But these days I think they will have strong competition from SIP and Skype, especially on phones such as the Nokia N80. Their advantage: They don´t bind the user to the cellular operator as UMA does and thus could potentially be cheaper. For the user, competition is good and will have a positive influence on prices.

NTT DOCOMO of Japan combines art and technology on their booth. Picture 2 shows some mobile phone art. At the booth they demo 3G video streaming vs. HSDPA streaming at 2 MBit/s. Big difference! And they have technical experts on the stand to discuss their view of wireless evolution: 1 GBit/s, 100 MHz channel bandwidth  (compare to 5 MHz of UMTS today), QPSK and 16QAM modulation, OFDM downlink, CDMA uplink, 4x4 Mimo. Heavy stuff, but speed has it´s price.

My last pick of the day is Picsel. They have a great eMail program and file attachment handler for S60 (and Java for other phones) that removes file attachements and downloads a mobile adapted version of the document. Very fast, very slick and reduces the amount of data you have to download or store on the phone.