MWC2010: Nokia Bores, Android ScoresMWC2010: Nokia Bores, Android Scores

Mobile World Congress 2010 has kicked off into high gear with lots of news from Barcelona. Nokia forgot to announce anything new, but there are a half-dozen new Android phones on the show floor, including the Motorola CLIQ XT, headed for T-Mobile.Nokia's aimlessness has somehow managed to drift into a deep fog. This morning, Nokia executives took the stage and rattled off impressive -- though boring -- statistics about the adoption of its Ovi Maps product, its Ovi Store downloads, and its Ovi Music service. The company had the devoted attention of thousands of journalists and chose only to talk about past accomplishments.

Ovi was the theme of Nokia's press conference. The company, for the first time in 10 years, introduced no new phones at all during Mobile World Congress. Last year, the company introduced several high-end models. This year, nothing. What's going on, Nokia? This is not how the market leader should be behaving. Rather than stand up against the opposition, Nokia appears to be laying down its sword. It's quite evident that Nokia is not the giant it used to be.

Even Nokia and Intel's announcement to merge Moblin and Maemo into a single mobile Linux platform (called MeeGo) didn't generate much enthusiasm.

Capitalizing on that is the Android platform. Motorola announced the new CLIQ XT, a slightly specced up version of the CLIQ, headed for T-Mobile later this year. Like the original CLIQ, it runs Android 1.5 and has MOTOBLUR on board. The one big difference is that it completely loses the slide-out QWERTY keyboard on the original CLIQ and uses only an on-screen software keyboard. It looks decent enough.

But that's just the start for Android.

Android debuted on at least six other handsets: one from Garmin-Asus, three from Acer, two from Sony Ericsson. All of these devices feature fairly impressive spec sheets.

And the devices aren't all. Lots of new software and services are headed to the Android platform, including Flash 10.1, a new browser from Access, motion and gesture-controlled applications from GestureTek, and more.

Day one is barely half over, and already Nokia has been out-matched by Android, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and others.