Mobile World Congress tablet tsunami is a landmark industry shift

CATASTROPHE can often be seen coming from some way off. History is replete with examples - the arrival of the Romans in Egypt, the Visigoths coming over the hills of Rome, General Custer dividing his calvary to fight the Indians, the 30,000 strong Zulu army that encircled 1,500 British soldiers at Islandwana.

So The INQUIRER wonders why people that have reached the dizzy heights of CEO of multi-billion dollar international companies can't act now that the open source operating system tablet and smartphone tsunami is no longer in the distance and is self evident at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.

The scale of the news volume from the event belittled this year's Consumer Electronics Show, which is supposed to be the biggest electronics trade show in the world. If evidence was needed that the mobile Internet and tablet markets are exploding like, well, the Cambrian explosion of lifeforms 530 million years ago, then this year's MWC was it.

Almost everyone had a tablet and almost all of those were using Google's operating system, Android, whether it was Android 2.2 Froyo, Android 2.3 Gingerbread or Android 3.0 Honeycomb.

The fact that tablets were appearing in such numbers at an event conceived for mobile phones is also a testament to their growth and their ability to use an operating system that was orignally designed for smartphones. At the other end of the MWC spectrum, sort of, smartphones are getting bigger and more capable, with more and more smartphone displays hovering around the 4-inch mark this year.

From Samsung's Galaxy S2 with its 4.27-inch display, 1GHz chip and Android OS, to the Viewsonic Viewpad 4 with its 4-inch display and the Xperia Play and its 4-inch screen and 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, the screen standard for good mobile Internet handsets is settling down below the 5-inch and above the 3-inch marks.

Nokia had nothing to launch at MWC and there were no new Windows Phone 7 handsets despite LG, HTC and others launching a wide range of WP7 phones last year. Nokia could not even get the E7 into some markets and the UK is still waiting for this business phone. Instead the two firms put on an unconvincing keynote double act.

If any more convincing was needed of Android's increasing ubiquity, Motorola's new Droid Pro handset selling itself as an Android business phone with a 1GHz chip but only a 3.odd-inch display, must be the final brick in the wall.

When it comes to tablets the story was very similar. Beyond the usual 7-inch sized displays MWC saw Ipad challengers weighing in with 10.1-inch girths. Acer had its Honeycomb device with an Nvidia Tegra 2 chip, which also powers Toshiba's Honeycomb tablet, while Samsung too showed off the larger version of its Galaxy Tab, which has Android 3.0 inside propelled by a dual-core ARM 1GHz chip.

Tablets' specifications are becoming as easy to predict as those of Wintel PC desktops. For decades Microsoft and Intel reigned supreme, but the age of the 3G mobile and WiFi wireless, always connected Internet and its universe of connected devices is apparently eluding the now older and increasingly less nimble information technology hardware firms that grew up in the PC era.

Is Google their Nemesis? We ask because the incumbent behemoths of the IT world, Microsoft and Intel and the dominant feature phone maker Nokia just can't seem to adapt fast enough to compete effectively.

Intel announced its first smartphone at CES 2010 and that became just a forgotten device demo when the product never materialised. Since then there has been more talk of smartphones powered by Intel, but nothing has appeared so far and neither CES 2011 nor MWC 2011 heard anything.

Chipzilla's CEO Paul Otellini remembered to say something at his MWC speech but the message was something, some time, later this year, but can't say what or when. A repeat of the mantra of 2010, most recently heard just before Christmas.

Nokia's fear of the future was most recently crystallised in its new CEO and ex-Microsoft executive Stephen Elop leaking a memo saying that the company was in dire straits, as if the world didn't know that already. The final word on his decision to jump into bed with his former employer, of which he owns a lot of stock, is yet to be written, but The INQURER doesn't think it will be good.

So, who are the small furry mammals awaiting the demise of the large lizards? Looking at the array of devices it is clear that Qualcomm, Nvidia and ARM are among them and seem to be unstoppable as Google casts its shadow like impending doom across the corporate landscape.

ARM is already talking about multi-core chips and Qualcomm confidently launched dual and quad core chips as well as being named processor of choice for a number of handsets launched at MWC. Meanwhile Nvidia's Tegra 2 is being regularly picked for tablets.

History is rarely revolutionary and instead follows long trends before critical change events happen. Certain CEOs will have only themselves to blame when the shareholders come calling with torches and pitchforks. This MWC was a watershed moment and The INQUIRER expects that this year will see the first casualties among the chief executives of PC era companies that have failed to keep up. µ