Another busy day at #MWC – too busy to give a detailed report but here are our highlights for the day…
HTC Stand
Some of the coolest phones were on show (everyone wanted a look at the HTC One X after yesterday’s announcement), but the thing that caught everyone’s attention was a contemporary dance display in the morning. Maybe Ubiquisys should get some can-can dancers next year!
The HTC stand on day two of MWC 2012
Texas Instruments
This was more business like than some of the other stands, but still lots of cool stuff on display and engaging lots of delegates. There was a whole area devoted to Wireless Infrastructure and Small Cell Technology as well as other key products, including DLP Pico Projectors, WiLink 8.0 Solutions and LTE revolution.
Cisco
Possibly the most screens on display at the show, Cisco’s corner stand certainly catches your attention, inviting you in for a tour of all their latest tech, with interactive displays on mobile and cloud collaboration, videoscape, next generation hotspots, cloud delivered apps and rich media realtime. The next generation hotspots were particularly interesting, offering seamless roaming and authentication, secure user experience and converged services.
Nokia
Most of the big players are in hall 8, but up the escalator and across the bridge you can find App Planet. Nokia’s massive area is at the top of a steep slope, and you feel like you’re making some sort of pilgrimage as you walk up. Everyone was talking about and latching onto the Lumia phone with its new ‘reading experience’ and the 808 Pure View cameraphone. The whole stand was heaving, with an unfeasible staff-to-punter ratio. Staff were all clad in blue stripy tops, making them easy to pick out. Aside from the phone product area, a dark corner contained Nokia Music, and there was a big developer space with obligatory beanbags, supplying app builders with info on how to develop for Nokia phones.
Nokia announced a number of new devices this year
Other News
LG have announced a series of new phones, including the LG Optimus 3D Max, which can record video in 3D! Samsung put their latest device, the Galaxy Beam, on show, a phone that can project images and videos. In other big mobile news, Sony have announced two new Xperia devices. For more information on these new models and other announcements, take a look at this CNET article.
The Latest Small Cells News
Ubiquisys’ Will Franks took questions from the floor first thing at the Small Cell Forum, kicking off the stand’s schedule of talks for the day. Later we saw Prabhakar Chitapru from the Small Cell Forum, Mark Grayson from Cisco and Simon Saunders, chairman of Small Cell Forum. Some interesting stats and opinions came out of this, considering the growth and spread of small cells (Simon Saunders proposed 62.4 million in use by 2016), the business case for their deployment and their possible applications.
Prabhakar Chitapru speaking at the Small Cell Forum stand
At the Ubi stand we’ve continued to see a lot of buzz around our new smart cells, the result of our strategic collaboration with Intel. We put on demonstrations from established apps developers like Edge Datacoms and Intrinsyc to highlight some of the valuable applications of these new devices, such as caching video content at the edge to save backhaul and provide an instant playback experience for mobile users.
Smart cells will allow us to push the boundaries and do things that were never possible before, the result of harnessing in-line processing power and storage in the smart cell, power which was previously only available in the core network. Examples include:
Dynamic, predictive cache of popular and repeat media maintained and served direct from the small cell, reducing backhaul traffic by up to 40% and delivering fast load times for users.
Video optimisation: automatic real-time optimisation of video content to improve end-user experience on mobile devices.
User protection: real-time virus check, deep packet analysis and URL filtering using McAfee technology – all of the quality features of the core network delivered more efficiently at the edge.
Fast upload: photos and video uploads go to a proxy app in the small cell. Users get fast uploads with minimum battery drain whilst the small cell takes on the task of gradually uploading to the web.
It also means some important changes to video advertising to mobile devices. For the first time, advertisers will be able to guarantee that video content is served to consumers at a consistently high quality and reliability, because the ads run directly from the smart cell.
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