Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

3GSM World Congress in Barcelona starts on Monday and lasts for 4 days. Rest assured, media will be flooded by press releases and commentary on the exhibit during next week.

I'm not there, and I'm not sure I'm sad about it. Two years ago I stood in a booth for a whole week, constantly talking about the products we offered (people stood in line), and were in maybe 10 customer meetings at hotels. At least I think they were customers meetings. It's all a bit blurry.

I figure there will be lots of buzz about the Apple iPhone, arguably deserved. I also expect there to be a lot said about location based services and phones with GPS, mobile advertizing, user generated content, IP Multimedia Subsystem (and what it might be useful for; see below), mobile TV, music and video downloads, mobile e-mail and IM, higher speed 3G (but probably not that much about real 4G), flatrate data (hopefully), emerging markets and lowcost phones, among other things.

Regarding IMS: The use cases I've seen so far have all been a bit lame, like push-to-talk (who cares really?) , push-video, push-file etc. Why not go for useful stuff, like multimedia blogging to popular services, real telephone-like voice-over-IP (not just PoC), user generated multimedia uploads and downloads, IMPS for established services etc?

Here's some information about things to expect to see at 3GSM World Congress:

Wireless industry heads to Spain meeting

3GSM: Wireless Industry To Focus On Growth

3GSM World Congress 2007, Mobile Monday Peer Awards