Next week will be Big Event time again, with the start of the 3GSM World Congress on Tuesday 14th Feb. For those not in the know, the event is another opportunity for the big mobile manufacturers to strut their stuff and show off their latest mobile technologies. If you thought CES 2006 was good, just wait for 3GSM: it's all about the mobile!

 

So what can you expect from this year's 3GSM World Congress? Well, CEO's for one thing. The big guns from Nokia, Motorola, LG, Ericsson, O2, Vodafone, Orange, and Microsoft will all be there.  Major themes of the show will include mobile advertising, mobile entertainment (music, games, video and mobile TV), multimedia and smartphone handsets, and demonstrations of new 'super 3G technology, HSDPA. 

 

More details on the 3GSM World Congress preview after the jump.

 

In Europe, DVB-H is the standard for mobile TV, and a whole plethora of companies will be showing off their latest DVB-H hardware.  Handset manufacturers BenQ, Nokia, Motorola, NEC, Sagem, Samsung and Siemens will all be showing off mobile phones or prototypes that support this standard.  If there's one thing all the manufacturers agree on, it's that 2006 will be the year of 2006. 

 

In addition to the new devices (and Samsung alone will be announcing a series of mobile TV phones destined for the European market), many broadcasting companies will be making announcements on Mobile TV content, including the BBC, Big Brother creator Endemol, and UK news channel ITN.

 

Aside from Mobile TV, many other forms of mobile entertainment will be evident. Nokia will be showing off their latest N Series mobile phone that use WLAN to seamlessly transfer videos and music from mobile phones to TVs and stereo systems. 

 

 

New fixed and mobile services such as BT's Fusion that enable the same mobile handset to use a mobile phone or a user's broadband connection for calls, will be a clear theme at 3GSM.  Nokia, for example, will be demonstrating IP-based voice and multimedia services on mobile devices that connect via WLAN and GSM/WCDMA.

 

Expect announcements from mobile network operators, network device manufacturers, IT solutions companies and telcos, all trying to encourage the user to use their systems, while fending off the threat from the competition. This battle should be fun to watch.  Mobile and fixed line broadband convergence is inevitable, but mobile network operators obviously want all calls to be made over their network. So the operators know they have to provide the service, but they really don't want to!

 

Smartphones have been extremely successful of late, with sales of smartphones increasing by 9.3% in 2005, compared 3.7% for ordinary phones (according to Jupiter Research).  At 3GSM, expect many smartphones to be on display.  Samsung, for example, will be showing off their SGH-i750 smartphone, which is a PDA in a mobile form factor. For smartphones to really take off, though, it's the form factor that's crucial, and according to ZDNet, the right shape hasn't been found yet.  Expect some seriously cool attempts to be made at 3GSM though.

 

 

HSDPA (or 'super-3G') is all the rage at the moment, supporting speeds of up to 14.4Mbps (though expect only 3.6Mpbs in the first incarnations).  NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Nortel, Sony Ericsson and others will all be showing off their latest super-fast mobile technology.

 

And that's just a taster of what to expect! CES 2006 was consumer heaven, but 3GSM is where the whole mobile industry throws its weight around. Full coverage begins next Tuesday, right here on Mobile Mentalism.