Just now Vodafone published a press release, that the Vodafone Group will sell the Apple iPhone in the following 10 countries:

• Australia
• Czech Republic
• Egypt
• Greece
• Italy
• India
• New Zealand
• Portugal
• South Africa
• Turkey

… wow. There is still an open question, which rates Vodafone will offer with the iPhone - and whether Apple will go on with their strategy of working with national exclusive partners. Whatever we’ll here in the future - that deal will boost the market for mobile iPhone applications.

So, let’s see what will come next …

Besides the well known top dogs in the mobile world, like Nokia and SonyEricsson we had one of the newcomers in our video walk through, yesterday. But that newcomer Garnim did not need to step to far from his core business as they are big in the GPS-handheld-device market. So it’s not a big issue for the mobile industry to classify their market entry.
Google, on the other hand, is not predictable in many dimensions: Open platforms, like the mobile OS called android, they are developing within the Open Handset Alliance, will be released as open source in the future. The mobile network operator smiled at open source projects in the past - or ignored them. Sometimes they even worked against these projects. The control over the (mostly subsidized) handsets should be in the hands of the operator. With android, everything should change and users should gain control over their own phone - like they did with their personal computer. That threatens the operators who are afraid of dropping SMS and speech telephony revenues because of VoIP and IM-clients on the new open handsets. But there is a chance of generating new forms of revenues.
At the MWC Google and the CPU manufacturer ARM give a first impression in the look and feel of the new android user interface. Here is an android Video of a reference design phone. It is powered by an ARM processor and is quite fast in user interaction. The asianmanufacturer E28 just used android as his chance and ported android on one of it’s handsets for the Congress. Here also: quite fast screen animation speed.
As Apple’s iPhone, also android will really change the mobile world

P.S. Deadline for the android Developer Challenge of Google awarding 10 Mio. $ in total is: April 14th 2008

Here is a short video walkthrough of the new handsets presented and other insight at the GSMA Mobile World Congress today:

Garnim Nuvifone … the Smartphone mixed with a personal GPS navigation device.

Nokia N96 … their new flagship product to compete with the iPhone: The Finnish leader in worldwide handset marketshares included the mobile TV standard DVB-H, a 16 GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot. Symbian S60 is running as the mobile Operating System. So it has a well functioning but oldfashioned userinterface - and there is tons of software out there. You can watch your videos or mobile TV at a glossy 2.8″ QVAG screen and can use nearly every connection you want: quad band GSM (850/900/1800/1900MHz) - with GPRS, HSDPA and EDGE support for high speed data connections, dual band WCDMA (900/2100MHz) - also called UMTS in Europe - and WiFi (802.11b/g). It even has a GPS-receiver built in.

SonyEricsson XPERIA X1 … the SonyEricsson people try to compete with the elegance of the Apple iPhone by using Windows Mobile and refurbishing the user interface. It’s equipped with a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard and a glossy 3″ WVGA display, also a built in GPS-receiver. It works with a variety of GSM HSDPA/HSUPA networks as well as Wifi.
They created a inspiring ad for the XPERIA X1

… BTW … it’s the biggest event in the mobile inustry and everybody is talking about a company which isn’t even exhibiting there - Apple with it’s iPhone

The people at Skyhook Wireless really did a smart job with their Wi-Fi Positioning System: They just use the highly distributed public and private Wi-Fi infrastructure of everyone as reference points for their location tracking. So basically every WiFi-enabled device can use their technology if Skyhook Wireless scanned and located the hotspots that specific area.
I did not find any competitors, yet. Sure, there are companies like innerwireless with their PanGo location management software, or Cisco with their Wireless Location Appliance, or the Finnish ekahau working in the field of Wi-Fi locating technology. But they all focus on closed business solutions where a dedicated infrastructure is used for tracking.
So the Skyhook Wireless WPS solution looks like an innovative and unique way - and an interesting way to realize navigation and location based services in metropolitan areas. Opening up their API for web developers was a brilliant idea - so let’s use it.

No need for handheld GPS devices which do not function properly in metropolitan areas

Steve Jobs presented a new feature of the iPhone - and also the iPod touch. Especially the iPod touch transforms into a new category of devices by adding location based services: By cooperating with Skyhook Wireless it is possible to get the own location by triangulating the signals from different WiFi-hotspots. The iPhone uses also the well known method by using the cell-ids to find the current location. It’s quite interesting, that it seems that Apple is not cooperating with the mobile network operators to get the location by cell ids and triangulation: They realized this feature by cooperating with Google. When I think of the hurdles to realize mobile Location Based Services (LBS) with the different operators … this is not a bad idea.
We really can be curious, whether the iPhone SDK will be the kickoff of a new era in LBS. Maybe Apple will also provide the iPhone web developers with the LBS-SDK Loki SDK for their web applications - that would really roll up the LBS-scene