China Mobility 2009 : A Recap
July 2009, I attended the Mobility China 2009 conference and exhibition held in the luxury Beijing International Hotel. Instead of giving you a chronological report of the event, I’d just like to share some interesting observations.
At first it was billed as future expo of the chinese mobile company. It was supposed to be one of the premier event to showcase how mobile business and service can help chinese communicate.
First of all, to my surprise: none of them from Chinese company appeared to be present. Most of the exhibition later was filed by Japanese companies. In fact there were so many attendee speaks Japanese, the organizer has several japanese translator available.
I asked myself why this happened? All I hear is that due to recession most of the chinese mobile companies has gone to survival mode and could not spare the money for the marketing.
Back to the exhibition, all the japanese products hardly had any relation to Modern Mobile Service or product, not even to iphone information could be found. In general, only showing a selection of well-known business software that is popular in Japan such as comics and virtual life. It seems like they wanted to recycle their old technologies and reach Chinese customers wherever they could get them, obviously ignoring the purpose of the event.
The second platinum sponsor was KDDI, a Japanese Company with Chinese subsidiary and a joint venture of KDDI and China Telecom Shanghai. It was supposed to show off their new 3G network soon be available in China. However all I heard during the keynote is their comics server and 3d Java games. The first ones I spotted were running 3D games. That confused me a bit, because I thought, they were targeting serious enterprise customers. Last but not least, there was a little stage were some of their developers offered expertise insight to the upcoming 3G networks cell phone.
By the way, I did not find any booth of China Mobile, the third platinum sponsor. Strange? Well, may be I simply missed it.
Samsung had a very small both, and I would even say it had a somewhat unprofessional appearance. Four guys were sitting around a folding table with only one object on it. It was a bit of a shame, since the exhibit deserved a much better presentation. I was really impressed: They had a Samsung Q1 Ultra UMPC running Linux for 3G network. I have been longing for such a machine for quite a while; I even Googled a thousand times to see if somebody has successfully installed Linux on the Q1, but the results drew no clear picture of it. But I finally had one in my hand, and everything seemed to function, even the GPS receiver. So, now I am looking to see where I can buy such a cool device. I hope I’ll find out soon.