My writeup of day 1 is here. This is more of a summary of impressions rather than a description of days 2-4, partly because I caught some horrible virus and died on Day 4 and partly becuase it was all more of the same.
Anyway before getting in to the technical bits I'd like to recommend ETSI as the bestest standards body in the world. Not that I'm cheap to bribe or anything but not only did they give me a T shirt they also gave me champagne and interesting gossip about vendors and standards. All in all much better than losers like the ITU in my completely unbiased opinion. A commenter emailed a request that I should please illustrate the "cheap sexist tricks". Well normally, being a caring nonsexist kind of chap, I wouldn't dream of giving publicity to those who use such exploitative and degrading techniques, but since it was specially requested, by email no less, I decided to lower my standards and the photo on the right is the result (the real sickos may click on the link to see it in more detail).
In the previous post I wondered idly where Nokia did their schmoozing and my colleague discovered that when he was looking for a more substantial breakfast that a croissant at the beginning of Day 2. Nokia rented the entire Noga Hilton hotel, with entry permitted only to Nokia invitees, and I think he said that Samsung had done the same to the Carlton. By the way Siemens' monster liner in the harbour was noted as being rather fitting for the company i.e. big, lumbering and expensive to operate - this may not have been the message Siemens was trying to get across. Again as I noted in my day one write up laptops were ubiquitous. Orange and SFR were handing out 20minute free trial subscriptionsfor their public wifi networks and various people sponsered free WiFi access points around the place. I'm not sure if the sponsorship did these companies any good, I was vaguely aware that Ericsson sponsored one of them but there were others that I have no idea who sponsored although I think ipWireless was one. I have to say that while I appreciated this free wifi greatly, as did bazillions of others, I figure an enterprising chap could have made a fortune selling electrical power. There were never enough power sockets and in the vicinity of the wifo points all sorts of powered things such as drinking water fountains were unplugged so that their sockets could be used to recharge one laptop or another. It sems like very few people own laptops as good as the Instapundit's one.
Various companies were offering "free smartphone giveaways", but it was noted that a more certain way to get a "free smartphone" would have been to have a friend on a scooter hanging around just outside as the getaway vehicle after a quick run through the show grabbing a selection of kit in use by the participants. I took a closer look at the Nokia 3G phones. Although still maintaining Nokia's favourite brick look they were impressive. As you can see from the pictures they aren't that large and they seemed fully featured. From what I could see they did videocalling just fine and otherwise had most if not all of the applications available for any of Nokia's series 60 smart phones. One thing that did occur to me though was to wonder how video calling would work for real unless you had an earpiece and possibly a way to prop up the phone. I see a couple of problems that video phones have which regular ones don't which are based on the fact that the video phone has to be held in front of you and facing you in order for you to see the image of the other party. This means that a) you have to be on "speakerphone" which is going irritate the crap out of your neighbours and b) if you are having a long call it's going to get tiring unless you can somehow prop the thing up.
Finally one thing I did notice was that although the phones had some different features (e.g.video-calling, larger screens), they also clearly shared a lot. In at least one case I got confused about whether I was looking at the same phone as I had seen before or not. It helped having people like Mr "Cellphone Radiation" over on the left to talk to so that I could see all of the different varieties side by side as it were. The one problem I have, and this is not a Nokia specific complaint - it applied to all vendors, is that all these 3G phones lacked a good compelling "wow must have" factor. I have no doubt that at some point we will see a killer application but I'm not clear what it will be.
In fact one thing that really jumped out at me was how 2.xG services seem to provide entirely sufficient bandwidth for innovative applications. The press was buzzing about HSDPA and maybe the big brains in the conference part thought they needed more speed but on the show floor what was amazing was what can be done with much less data. For example an Italian company (Atop Innovation) managed to demonstrate stuffing an entire TV channel down a GPRS link and also showed how the same concept could be used (for example) to remotely monitor a home security system (or any other webcam and yes do I mean those sorts of XXX webcams) with feedback mechanisms to move the camera or do other things. In fact what impressed the most about 3GSM world was how well the 2G networks held out given that there were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of geeky people wanting to gabble on their phones. For example I only had one call failure myself while trying to reach someone else in the show and the recipient indicated that the problem could have been that he was in a subterranean toilet at the time.
One thing that did come up here and there was the question of standards. Not so much the idea of anyone being against them so much as which standard to use. Although some vendors (six letters beginning with N) do fail to implement even generous interpretations of 3GPP standards (the use of "based on" and "compliant" in the literature should be hints) the major problem is that there are so many varients to chose from that vendor interoperability generally only occurs when the customer bangs their heads together. Closer to the user - in the handset for example - there tends to be less chance that pressure from anyone big will enforce interoperability. Vodafone, Orange, NTT Docomo etc. do mandate certain features and functions as basic requirements but they tend not to talk to each other so phone makers and phone application vendors have a hard time making sure that their feature works identically on all networks. At 3GSM world it was clear to me that the defacto handset standard is Symbian with either the UIQ or Nokia Series 60 interface. Almost all the little booths from ISVs that had handset demos had a symbian handset and I would say that 80% of time it was a Nokia one. For people like Microsoft, Qualcomm or Blackberry this is a problem. Sure there were apps on Microsoft's OS around and the Qualcom and Backberry booths had plenty of ISVs with sample BREW or Blackberry apps but the general platform required was Symbian. Services were also typically GSM related - SMS and MMS were the usual prerequisites. This is good news for Nokia and ARM and Symbian but may be less good news for the idea that you can have one phone that works seamlessly all over the world.