Tole Hart

The CTIA 2009 Show was smaller than usual by some estimates down 20% and there was noticably less foot traffic still there were some interesting points and trends.

There is a strong push by the operators to offer qwerty keypad or touch screen phones to all segments of the market in order to sell data plans.

Carriers are also looking to develop and foster their own applications stores, and sell feature phones which give customers many of the service that can be offered on smartphones like social communities.

There is a strong carrier push behind netbooks as per AT&T recent bundling plan annoucement and we expect to see more news in this area.

There is a growing battle around the address book and a number of companies are offering their own services or white labeling carriers services.  In many of these services the address book is linked to social networking sites, instant messaging, email, and Twitter and provide activity status. The companies battling in this space that were talking about it at the show include. Nokia (Ovi), Yahoo, Apple, Good, and Miyowa.

FLO TV, formally Media FLO, is still in the process of building out market presence by increasing the number of markets served and increasing the number of handsets with its capabilities.

Skype introduced its VoIP service via WiFi on the iPhone but it still lacks access via the wide area network via most handsets which will limit its overall adoption on a mobile phone.

Neustar introduced the concept of universal barcodes. Currently there are at least 5 major 2D barcode manufacturers in the world which require different software to read.  This has added some confusion from brands who are looking to use this technology to interface with customers. Neustar’s plan is to allow one software to read all of the 1D and 2D barcodes and to allow 1D barcodes to be read as if they are 2D barcodes. This technology has the potential to be a key customer interface technology via the mobile phone.

The Nokia N97 had a sleek form factor and screen which stayed upright as the user types on the keypad. It also allowed for many of the smartphone features that customers are looking for like, email, mobile communities, instant messaging, games and applications from the Ovi Store.

There was some interest in mobile books via smartphones by a company called Shortcovers. Books can be downloaded to the iPhone, iTouch, Blackberry and Andriod devices.

Lastly, LogMeIn, leaders in remote access to PCs, now allows access to your PC via an iPhone.