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Big in Barcelona

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 13 Feb 08, 20:45 GMT

Looking back on the teeming madness that is the mobile phone industry's annual shindig, there was no one headline-grabbing story, but plenty of pointers to the road ahead. I've picked five things that were big in Barcelona.

Touchscreen

Apple's touchscreen iPhone certainly started something. Sony Ericsson, LG and Samsung were among the companies launching new touch-screen handsets. But not everyone is convinced that consumers want touch on its own – LG, for instance, has included a slide-out keyboard with its music phone. Texters still struggle with touch, but as Apple refines its software, expect plenty more imitations in the coming months.

Faster Networks

Talking to network people can give you a headache as the blizzard of acronyms – WiMax, LTE, UWB – fall thick and fast. But one thing's clear - if you have a need for speed you can expect your mobile connection to get a lot faster in the coming year. The battle is on between WiMax and LTE (Long Term Evolution) to show where mobile networks go after 3g – and in Barcelona LTE seemed to be winning more hearts and minds amongst operators than WiMax, even though it is a little further away. Korea's LG was promising downloads of up to 60 Mbps with its LTE technology – as someone who only gets 2 Mbps on his home broadband connection, that's a mouth-watering prospect. Mind you, promised speeds often don't materialise.

Femtocells

The mobile operators will be keen to see some of the work of these new networks handed over to customers in their homes by the Femtocell. This small mobile phone personal base station (some people in the industry were not amused when I described it in a previous post as a mobile phone mast in your front room) will undergo more trials in the coming months. The networks are very excited by a technology which could give customers such a fast, cheap, mobile connection at home that they give up their fixed-line phones. But they need customers to share that excitement.

Mobile Payments

This is an idea that has been around for a decade without really taking off – I remember going to Helsinki in 1999 and filming a vending machine that would sell me a Coke if I sent it a text message. But now it does seem to be happening, not in Europe or the United States, but in Kenya and Afghanistan. Last year Vodafone chose Kenya to launch its M-Pesa service which allows users to transfer money by mobile. One use is amongst migrant workers who can send money across the country without getting on a bus. 1.6 million people have signed up in Kenya, and now a similar service is to be launched in Afghanistan. There it will be used mainly by microfinance organisations to deliver loan instalments. There are even plans for voice recognition software to give wider access to the service in a country with high illiteracy rates.

Android

Google's new open operating system for mobiles was supposed to be the biggest thing in Barcelona this week. Yes, there was plenty of talk about Android– and even a few prototype handsets – but there was less buzz about it than you might think. There were plenty of new Symbian phones to look at and Sony Ericsson's first Windows Mobile handset, the Xperian 1, was rated by many as the best in show. Suddenly talk that existing operating systems would be swept aside by Google's arrival seemed overdone. Still, this next time next year there will be plenty of Android phones available, the smartphone market will have expanded dramatically, and the battle of the operating systems can begin in earnest.

By the way, the video features Bill Gadja of the GSM association (they organise the show) giving his assessment of the stories of the week. You may notice that it looks a lot more polished than the other videos on this blog – that's because it was filmed by a professional cameraman on a professional camera!

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