Full Nelson: Mobile World Congress Preview: The Battle For Mobile SupremacyFull Nelson: Mobile World Congress Preview: The Battle For Mobile Supremacy

High-Speed Mobile Networks

All eyes are on 4G, the horse race that garners most of the attention. Its only real meaning today is that some day mobile networks get faster. There are a handful of U.S. cities covered by WiMax, which has become Sprint's big bet based on its most recent disappointing earnings announcement, and the company says it will cover areas with a market size of 120 million potential subscribers by the end of this year. Many, including Unstrung's Dan Jones, are already raising questions about WiMax's viability. Meanwhile, Verizon's LTE trials are underway; AT&T just announced its LTE equipment providers (Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson) with hopes of a late 2010 trial or two.

My colleagues at Light Reading and Unstrung will be talking with executives from Orange, Vodafone, MTS (Russian), TeliaSonera (the Nordic carrier that had one of the first LTE deployments), Deutsche Telekom, and more, and they surely will be asking about 4G progress and plans.

Despite the noisy iPhone user complaints, 3G is where the action is... if meltdown can be considered action. What applications will enterprise IT want to unleash if connections are slow and unreliable? (That question was rhetorical.) While AT&T and Verizon whip out their dense-ish maps, others are building offload scenarios (new wireless backhaul networks, Femtocells, WiFi hotspots, policy control). Unstrung's Michelle Donegan's piece sums up these plans well.

Everyone from the equipment manufacturers to the device makers to the chip companies is also pondering how to get 3G, LTE, and WiMax working simultaneously -- in some cases to hedge their bets, and in others to eliminate the nasty inertia that choice sometimes begets. Maravedis lists some of the developments here.

There is an impact to the enterprise. Those applications we talked about earlier need a more robust and reliable network, for one thing. More important (because it has a bigger impact on the mobile carrier network) are the other application services that 4G will surely usher in: presence (at the user and application level), personal videoconferencing and video chat, collaboration, and better Web browsing and data processing, especially on tablet devices where the end user has a better viewer experience.

Devices/Tablets

It wouldn't be Mobile World Congress without new devices. Above all the Android noise (HTC, let's suppose), we should see something new from Sony Ericsson and Samsung, both of which are holding press conferences. Last year, Sony-Ericsson showed off a 12.1 megapixel phone, while others showed green-phone prototypes, and there was even a phone that could record high-definition video (720p). For a full rundown, you can read my report from last year here.

There are rumors of a new Nokia device (N8) that can record high-definition video, has a 12-megapixel camera, and HDMI output, among other features. One rumor has it coming out, while another one denies it.

Meanwhile, the Palm/WebOS rumor mill is in full tilt, with acquisition speculation, talk about a GSM version of the Pre and Pixie, and a scare over a production shutdown in Tawain. Poor Palm, always the bridesmaid, even when it produces a device of merit.

Our round-the-clock blogger, Eric Zeman (seriously, this guy has meetings from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day!), will be covering all of this news, with plenty of hands-on video to boot.

There's more, but I've got to pack my Flamenco shoes.

Fritz Nelson is the editorial director for information and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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