MarCom Professional

Mobile World Congress - devices every marketer should know about

Despite the recent follies of the bankers, business remains business and technology marches onwards. And at this year's Mobile World Congress the mobile industry is putting the user front and centre in every effort to differentiate one from another.

Smaller. Lighter. Brighter. Faster. Easier. And most of all, as user-friendly as can be.

This colourful image is a bank of Samsung Omnia's demonstrating their bright OLED screens. I'd like to show you one of their new devices but photography was not permitted. What a crazy decision. This is a SHOW. There are many journalists and bloggers here and Samsung tells us photography is not allowed... it can only make anyone think that the Samsung team has no idea about social media marketing!

I spotted a marketing innovation from Qualcomm Mediaflo... a technology to stream data to mobile devices predominantly for video applications such as real-time TV. Rather than interrupt viewing with the same adverts for all viewers, one of their latest innovations allows a different set of adverts to be delivered based on rudimentary user segmentation.

For example, their demo differentiated between a fictitious male and female viewer. Here's a pic I took of an ad running for Red Bull that played on the phone for the 'male customer' but not for the 'female'...

For consumers demanding a higher quality entertainment experience from their mobile devices, LG was delighted to launch the first mobile, the LG Arena, with Dolby Mobile for an all-round superior sound experience.

The picture of the phone below portrays another interesting feature of the phone, cube navigation. This 3D approach is designed to free the user from menu tree hell... can't comment on how well it achieves this objective however as you'd need to use it in anger.

Giving the consumer easy, always-on, low cost access to the Web is a hot trend, and the blurring of what's a phone and what's mobile computing continues. The rapidity with which this trend develops will have ramifications for your marketing mix. These are great first devices for anyone new to the mobile Web, but also serve as a light weight second machine for the more technophilic. They are designed to be low power, typically running for considerably longer between battery recharges.

I'll leave you with images of three such devices.

The first is Qualcomm's Snapdragon based on ARM's Cortex processor (rather than a power hungry Intel... disclosure, ARM is a client). It is shown here in a netbook device running Ubuntu.

The second is a similar device from Texas Instruments, this time using their OMAP chip based on ARM Cortex and running Ubuntu.

And lastly, for those of you who really value mobility, the LG watch cum phone cum music player cum PDA with full touch screen capability a la iPhone could make your Christmas list in 2009.