Executives from the mobile phone industry streamed Sunday into Barcelona for a major congress, two days after cellphone heavyweight Nokia sought help from Microsoft to avert a looming loss of market share.
The unstoppable rise of smartphones - effectively pocket-sized computers that have shaken up the industry's pecking order - is to be a key topic at the Mobile World Congress, an annual expo with 50,000 attendees that begins Monday and runs through Thursday.
Whereas the cellphone industry was troubled one year ago by recession, sentiment is likely to be buoyant at the Mobile World Congress, which is attended by chief executives and top engineers.
While makers parade slick new phones, network companies will be discussing ways to earn the revenue needed to pay for more powerful networks that can handle the torrents of video and webpages accessed through today's advanced phones.
Nokia announced Friday that it was entering an alliance with Microsoft to use Windows Phone "as its primary smartphone platform," effectively committing its own long-time operating system Symbian to a slow death without any further investment.
News reports said Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop told employees confidentially that the move was like escaping a burning oil rig by jumping into the icy waters of the Atlantic: a desperate escape.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.