Smartphones: it's a thin thing

ASIA'S LARGEST integrated telecom, networking and broadcasting expo, CMMA 2008 took place last week in Singapore, just closed.

The show conglomerate, consisting of Communic Asia, Enterprise IT, Broadcast Asia and Interactive DME (Digital Media & Entertainment) sections, had some 2,300 exhibitors spread across 69,000 square metres of expo space for the four days ending 20 June. Everything from satellite systems, Wimax setups and network security to HDTV broadcast centres and virtual TV studios could be found here. However, just like last year, the real stars of the show were the smallest exhibits - smartphones.

The high prices and margins of this phone category, not to mention the extra branding value, make that business worth the extra work.

This year, the show happened to take place right after Apple's second-generation 3G iPhone launch across the Pacific, and the influence was obvious on the booths of major competing mobile phone vendors. Samsung's Omnia, LG's Black Label and a host of Taiwanese entries are obvious Iphone lookalikes, as you can see, even though the girls showing them off did exhibit a wider variety or parentage.

Katya above, Jiahui below

Interestingly, Nokia didn't have a booth here this year - a pity, since it could have been the perfect E71 and E66 "enterprise phone" launch venue.

One big Taiwanese name - HTC - wasn't present directly at the show either. Rim was though, as teh Blackberry firm exends platform into the software service business, where BlackBerry Connect sat on top of half a dozen different vendors' phones, from Asus, Samsung, Nokia, E-ten, Sony Ericsson and above-mentioned HTC.

This could signal a future sea change for RIM, moving away from less profitable hardware sales of handsets, to the far more profitable cellphone software business, leaving the hardware competition to Finnish Nokia vs Korea vs Taiwan in the long run.

Yahoo! and its Widgets found a prominent place under the Singapore sun: as you can see, the booth was darn crowded - it bodes well for the future of paid applets running on top of a variety of Windoze, Symbian, Linux and so on phones, and, again, less well for the Iphone. Come to think of it, with the fresh Google cooperation there, maybe the Android platform will end up having some Yahoo Widgets.

Generally speaking, Windows Mobile seems to be gaining ground among many vendors, especially the Taiwanese, as it works out the quirks and, more importantly, the vendors can fit in 128MB or more RAM for its footprint - it's Windows after all, that means no diet on memory. The Taiwanese also have an advantage over both Korean and (whatever remains of) "Western" smartphone models in the screen department, providing full VGA 640 x 480 LCDs vs, say, 400 x 240 or so by most of the competition. Also, 3.5G HSDPA and HSUPA - for 3.5G modems too - is a standard feature, however WiMax vs LTE battle for the next generation of cell phones isn't over yet. More about that in a separate story...

Besides the smartphones and fashion phones, the ultra-slim approach still pulls in the audiences, whether for the phones or for the models carrying them - here's awaterproof one from NTT DoComo in Japan, fitting Singapore's regular downpours well.

Finally, we end with one little teaser for the upcoming Singapore SingTel F1 race on 28 September, the world's fist dowtown city night race, there was this F1 car on, where else, booth of SingTel, the region's dominant telco and sponsor of the above-mentioned race.

What a better proof that there's still money in them thar phones, especially all those subscriptions, services and such. More stuff on all the gadgets coming up soon. µ