Alec Saunders SquawkBox

All week long at Mobile World Congress the impact of cheaply available wireless broadband was evident.  From the folks who were broadcasting live with 3G wireless camera phones, to people uploading constant streams of photos from the show floor, and even the Microsoft group promoting mobile broadband PC’s, it was clear that inexpensive mobile broadband is a paradigm shifting technology. People use phones as media creation and consumption devices, and not just communications devices when broadband data is cheap. 

And how cheap is cheap? Our merry band of bloggers went out on the first day and bought Yoigo SIM cards, which offered us unlimited mobile data for a paltry €1.50 per day.  Martin Geddes informed me that he was paying just £12.50 per month (about $25) for 3GB of data. iPhone unlimited in the United States includes voice and data for $70.

Cheap is unlimited data for $25 to $50 per month. 

As the week wore on, I despaired that these services would ever come to Canada. After all, a single photograph shot with my N95 is nearly a megabyte in size.  Four minutes of video shot on my Nokia N95 results in a file of between 80 and 90 megabytes in size.    My $100 per month data plan, however, is capped at 200 megabytes with overage billed at $.05 per kilobyte.  That 90M video would use up nearly half of my data allowance for a month.

Will Canadians be left behind?

Maybe not.  I discovered today that both Rogers and Bell have recently introduced 1G data plans.  They seemed to have been rolled out quietly in the last few weeks. In fact, the service rep at Rogers went to great pains to tell me that this plan is a special promotion! Rogers’ plan is $65/month for 1GB of data.  I added it to my account immediately.   With 1GB of data, I can shoot over 1,000 photographs and upload them in a month, or even shoot some short video clips and upload those.  Moreover, with my N95’s WiFi, I can stretch that further by uploading non time-sensitive data in hot spot locations only.

There’s hope yet.  $65 for a gigabyte is a good start.  The best part?  My friendly Rogers rep broadly hinted that there was more good stuff coming shortly. 

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 was another "talked about" device that debuted at Mobile World Congress.  It’s Sony Ericsson’s first Windows Mobile device, representing a departure from their previous devices which have been built on Symbian.  It also has a unique arc slider design, which reveals an artfully hidden keyboard, as well as a touch screen.  And, not to be outdone by Nokia, the XPERIA X1 sports assisted GPS.

Here’s the promotional video they built.

As they say in Texas, though, "Big Hat, No Cattle".  You could see the X1 behind glass at the Microsoft booth…

… and at the Sony Ericsson booth a demonstrator showed the opening panels for four solid days, without letting anyone really near the device.  We’ll have to wait until they ship later this year to find out the real details. 

One of the very cool applications which debuted at Mobile World Congress was Yahoo OneConnect.  It’s a new tool that allows mobile users to aggregate social networking updates and messaging in one spot on the phone.  That means you can interact with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger and so on from a single place, as well as send and receive status updates.  It also provides location based services, so that you can see which friends are nearby.  And OneConnnect is integrated with the phone’s address book, to allow easy updates, dialing and so on.

I was pretty impressed.  This is one of the more seriously cool applications I saw at Mobile World Congress.  Here’s a photo demonstrating the application taking on the Yahoo booth.

And here’s a short video of the demonstration.  I was forced to stop recording after a few minutes when the Yahoo! police showed up to say that no recordings were permitted.  Thankfully they didn’t try to confiscate my phone!