Mobile industry gathers in Barcelona for big show

(GSMC Limited, a subsidiary of the GSMA)

The mobile phone industry's biggest event opens Monday as it begins to emerge from the global economic crisis with the promise of new devices that will revolutionise the way people communicate.

South Korean mobile phone maker Samsung and Swedish-Japanese rival Sony Ericsson started the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, a day early, unveiling late Sunday new smartphones as they seek to boost their shares of this fast-growing segment of the industry.

But all eyes will be on Microsoft on Monday when its chief executive, Steve Ballmer, hosts a press conference amid speculation that the US software giant will unveil its new Windows operating system for smartphones.

Attendance at the congress is expected to be about the same as last year but lower than the 55,000 people who attended the event in February 2008, prior to the crisis, according to GSMA, the industry group that organises the congress.

More than 47,000 people and 1,300 exhibitors are expected to attend the event this year, it said.

The Mobile World Congress comes as the industry begins to navigate away from a difficult period for the sector.

Global shipments of handsets had been falling every quarter since the third quarter of 2008, when the global financial crisis erupted, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics.

But shipments surged by 10 percent in the last three months of 2009, "signaling an end to the industry's year-long recession," Strategy Analytics said in a January 29 report.

Smartphones alone grew even faster in the fourth quarter, jumping 30 percent.

Sony Ericsson and Samsung, the world's second biggest mobile phone maker behind Nokia, have small slices of the smartphone segment, which is dominated by Nokia, iPhone-maker Apple and BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM).

Samsung unveiled its new touch-screen handset, the Samsung Wave, on Sunday, as part of its plans to triple its smartphone sales to 18 million units this year.

"This is a new era, the smartphone era," JK Shin, the head of Samsung's Electronics mobile business, said at a launch party for the Wave.

"Samsung is committed to making the smartphone era available for everyone. We are committed to making the smartphone era a true democracy for billions of people on all continents in all corners of the world," Shin said.

Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson unveiled three new smartphones as it seeks to overcome a "turbulent" year, said company chief Bert Nordberg.

While handsets have grabbed the headlines in Barcelona in the past, analysts say this year's event might focus more on operating systems such as Google's Android and applications that can be downloaded into smartphones.

"I think it's probably going to be a slightly different show in terms of the focus, as far as historically it has been a lot about hardware," said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at information technology research firm Gartner.

"In the last couple of years you started to see more around services and definitely this year applications will have a huge part in the theme," she said.

The newest, and less traditional, members of the mobile phone industry are also expected to make big headlines.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt will attend the conference for the first time and deliver an address Tuesday that will be broadcast live online.

The Internet giant has made a splash in the mobile phone industry with its Android operating system, launched in 2007 in a direct challenge to Microsoft.

Google also entered the hardware business last month when it launched its own smartphone, Nexus One.