MWC 2012 – Lookback at 2011

I’m looking forward to MWC 2012 this year – the excitement has being growing insanely for the past couple years, and it feels like 2001 again when the last mobile wave swept the industry. This year, it is going to go from strength to strength from last year.

Before going in, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at my observations from the end of MWC2011 and comment briefly on them. For full details click the original post

Form Factors
We’ve seen some of the new factors this year in variant tablet sizes (Samsung Galaxy, Kindle Fire) but we are just at the tip. It will be interesting to see what is showcased this year from the incumbents and new entrants.

Android
Well its growth didn’t disappoint last year, but fears of fragmentation and the inability to generate sufficient revenues haven’t subsided. They still have the lead in terms of sales, but Apple is crushing it in revenue generation both for themselves and for third party developers.

Messaging
While messaging has surged in the form of group messaging like WhatsApp and iMessage have taken off, it’s done it at the expense of SMS revenues. Carriers are obviously concerned as that has been a cash-cow for them so it will be interesting to see what their announcements around RCS-e will be.

LTE
Nearly every major city in the US has coverage now, and uptake has been pretty good but it is a long way from recouping their costs. With Apple making a killing off of carrier subsidies, it will be interesting to see if carriers maintain the status-quo. I’m looking for announcements at MWC12 which look to hedge themselves against Apple’s strength.

Payments
While there was some movement in 2011, not that many NFC devices really shipped and the use cases have matured yet.

I’m not sure if these topics will be hot buttons this year, but I expect some new topics to take a higher profile. Stay tuned.