ARM Community: 10 Years in the mobile market - Looking back at 3GSM 2001 and forward to MWC 2011 - ARM Community

Each year the great and the good of the mobile industry get together in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress to showcase what is going to be in our hands and pockets for the next few years. It has been many years since I last attended the event, with my last visit being 10 years ago when it was still 3GSM in Cannes. Then, there was as much talk about which yacht each company had as what was on show. I am glad to see the focus is back on what is on show. When you look back to Cannes in 2001 we were talking about what the impact would be of the SMS volume ramp on the networks and handsets, at that point there were only about 15 Billion texts being sent a month globally , and we were just starting to see colour displays appearing on mobile phones. In 2001 the mobile market was 430M units in 2010 there were 2,300M units shipped – how things have changed.

Fast forward 10 years and I am interested to see what will be the hot topics this year. Here are a few that I am going to keep an eye on during the event:

This year data is still hot but the scale and impact is beyond anything we could have imaged in 2001. One of the key areas I am keen to see is LTE and what the rollout looks like. As we start to see phones announced by the likes of HTC, LG and Motorola last month at CES, we will start to see what new services will be opened up by LTE. ARM announced two weeks ago what we are doing to support the LTE activities, with the launch of two new Cortex-R series products to address the higher demands for the modem solutions.

The next generation of smartphones or superphones always create a buzz like nothing else at the event. These are the phones that are going to drive the content and service usage for 4G. It is becoming more and more evident that the smartphone is the central communication device for many people – the drive to have it always with you, always on and always connected giving you a great communication experience only possible though combining your location, networking, accelerometers and imaging is fuelling the demand for the next breed of smartphones. So let’s see what the phone guys have come up with to feed this thirst.

We have come a long way since we saw the first colour screen on mobile phones with simple icon driven User Interfaces(UI). In 2011 the UI creates the main emotional attachment to a device – we are now looking at Stereoscopic 3D UIs, Augmented Reality and console performance games all in your hand. Graphics Processors (GPU) are key elements to bringing these things to life in your mobile and we expected to see GPUs appearing in a wider range of mobile phones and no longer limited to top end smartphones. If you want to have a look at what you will being seeing on your phone in the near future come to the ARM booth to see the cool TrueForce Stereoscopic game running on ARM Mali GPUs.

The next thing I am looking for is how smartphones are diversifying both at the top end as well as the entry level. Not everyone needs the performance levels offered by the top end “superphones” - even if we do all love to see what your phone will be able to do next! Entry level smartphones are appearing in the area where feature phones previously resided. People want to still have fundamental smartphone features like internet browsing and access to apps but at a lower cost point. Applications are a key aspect of this part of the market and having the ability to reuse the apps written and driven by the higher performing smartphones expands the appeal of these entry level phones. Meaning you don’t need to have a top end smartphone to play Angry Birds.

I will be blogging and tweeting (@ARMMultimedia & @ARMMobile) from MWC next week looking at how ARM and our Partners are enabling the cool new products and underlying technologies. Will be interesting to look back in 10 years time at what we see next week that transforms the mobile market in the future.

Trina Watt, Director of Channel Marketing, Media Processing Division, ARM. I like to think of myself as a “geek in marketers clothing”. Gadgets and technology have been a passion for me as long I can remember – from dismantling my first radio when I was about 8 to now running around regularly with 3 phones, a tablet and laptop to feed my tech thirst. I started in the tech industry nearly 20 years ago in Motorola and I have never ventured far from it. I am currently focused on promoting the visually exciting Mali graphics processors. I get to work with a wide range of partners who are creating the innovative devices of the future. For a geek it doesn’t get much better than that!