Mobile entertainment is king at cell phone show
Posted: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 7:41 PM
For the first time, a trade show for the cell phone industry is light on new phones. In the recent past there had been a slew of shiny new handset designs to admire. Not so this year.
The 2007 CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment expo, here in San Francisco, is focused on everything you can do on your smartphone aside from making a phone call.
Wireless data use over cell phones is exploding. According to a new CTIA survey, non-voice service revenues in the first half of 2007 rose 63 percent over the same period last year.
That means more and more people are using their cell phones to send and receive IMs, e-mails, text messages, download maps, Web pages, music and video files, photos and nearly everything else you can think of - other than voice calls.
The survey revealed that so far this year, text messaging set new records, with nearly 29 billion messages sent in the month of June, 2007.
Overall, there are now a record 243 million wireless users in the United States. And, they made more than 1.1 trillion minutes worth of cell phone calls in the first half of this calendar year. Glad I don’t have to pay that phone bill.
As for interesting stuff introduced at the show, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer announced new server software to make it easier for big businesses to roll-out, control and maintain Windows-based smartphones. Think of Microsoft System Center - Mobile Device Manager 2008 as a way get companies interested in using Windows Mobile devices instead of the other enterprise favorite the Blackberry.
(MSNBC.con is a Microsoft – NBC Universal joint venture.)
Mobile video is a big part of what’s next for your cell phone of the future. Among the big players in the field, MobiTV is reporting that they’ve passed 3 million subscribers – up from 2 million less than six months ago. Not only that, but they say that subscribers are spending more time viewing their video content. They and the rest of the industry are hoping that’s a glimpse of what’s to come in the future.
SlingMedia is here too – telling the world that if you install one of their video-over-the-Internet Slingboxes at home, you can watch videos from your cable or satellite provider – or even a DVD – on your cell phone. It looks very cool on the new, high-end phones with higher resolution screens, such as Nokia’s N95.
So far at the show, the sole new handset announcement is from AT&T and Samsung: the new Blackjack II smartphone. The Windows Mobile 6 device will be available in the next few weeks.
And, just like the iPhone was the big, underground talk of the CTIA’s spring show, rumors of a Google phone are making the rounds at this event. Google maps are becoming standard on many new smartphones – but so far, no sightings of a cell phone-based Google software. Lots of whispering in the convention hall, though.
