Ok so the film festival is probably bigger in some ways, but 3GSM World Congress is quite big enough for a small town like Cannes. In fact its too big which explains why this is the last year that 3GSM will be in Cannes. Next year they go to Barcelona and presumably thereafter 3GSM goes on the International Conference circuit from one large event venue to another.
Still Cannes seems determined to make everyone regret leaving. Tthe weather performed as it should have in February with an Azure sky and reasonable warmth while in the sun. The queues were long, especially the queues to pick up registration (which is not cheap BTW - €500 for exhibition only).but the crowds were good natured and I am sure the climate had something to do with that.
One thing that stood out was how people still use laptops. I wrote an article last year about how the laptop was the centre of their business life for many people and even at 3GSM world, where you might expect people to be more into smaller gadgets, the vast numbers of Dells, IBM Thinkpads etc. showed just how far that dream is from reality. One of the things that amuses me is how the various big players try to differentiate themselves, and how small players try to fake it as if they are big. This year the biggest boat in the harbour is Siemens. Other vendors rent yachts in the port next to the Palais des Festivals for their schmoozing of customers, Siemens appears to have rented an entire liner and stuck it out in the harbour. I don't know where Nokia do their schmoozing but I noticed that Motorola seemed to have taken an entire derelict bulding a couple of corners away and tarted it up specially. All in all it makes the rows of yachts tarted up specially with tacky ocrporate logos from Cisco to ZTE look just slightly tacky. There were sexy announcements from the likes of Nokia, Samsung etc. I may cover them tomorrow but its kind of silly. There a things happening and press releases aren't really much more than markers in the ground. The Nokia booth did seem to be pretty busy, busier than its neighbours anyway. Perhaps better for Nokia I saw a representative of the Chinese vendor ZTE (who make CDMA phones) using a top of the range Nokia with what looked like long practise. Either the Nokia UI really is far superior (my colleague was bitching about his new Samsung so that could be true) or even the competitors prefer to use Nokia.
Other interesting notes. I hadn't realised how much of a Samsung GSM phone is apparently made from stuff from others (Phillips). I thought both the Cisco and Microsoft booths looked rather sad, despite in the MS case someone trying to drum up enthusuasm with a prize draw Talking of prize draw - lots of places had them, many attempted to get thier draws filled through the use of booth babes and other cheap sexist tricks. And I'm not talking about the Sex SMS vendors either. Talking of sexy female flesh. The restaurants in Cannes were so full and our waitress so fashionable that her tattoo and butt crack was nearly stabbed by my colleague's fork as she served the adjacent table. In some places you only get this service in seedy backstreet bars after dark. In Cannes you get the same view for free at lunchtime. It is, actually, rather off-putting.