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For those lucky enough to escape the grey mono­tony of Lon­don last week (I was not so lucky) and escape to Bar­celona for the Mobile World Con­gress, they were in for a rare treat. In recent years the world’s largest mobile event has des­cen­ded into a rather dreary almost bor­ing lit­any of the same ol’ same ol’. This year appears to have been any­thing but…

Microsoft’s ebul­li­ent Steve Balmer lit­er­ally char­ging back into the fray with MS phone 7 which, I’m kinda shocked to say, seems to be get­ting rave reviews. Android show­ing its mettle with some decent look­ing kit like the new Motorola CLIQ XT and the inev­it­ably slick UI we’ve come to expect. In addi­tion, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s key­note on Google Goggles and the emer­ging aug­men­ted real­ityspace was great. Apple, in true brand fash­ion, deign­ing not to attend but still able to cause a monu­mental buzz with the run­away suc­cess of the AppStore. And Nokia? Des­pite the much-hyped but largely panned col­lab­or­a­tion with Intel on a new mobile OS called MeeGo, Nokia unveiled no new devices at all which is a first at MWC. Rather they chose to extol (or is that excuse?) the vir­tues of their Ovi store which seems unable to slow the gal­lop­ing suc­cess of AppStore. This piece of You­Tube bril­liance high­lights the com­mon perception.

As the mobile space seems, moment­ar­ily, to be fix­ated on applic­a­tions, MWC was awash with hun­dreds of com­pan­ies try­ing to muscle in. The recur­ring theme? A con­cern sur­round­ing the lack of stand­ards in the applic­a­tion space and the com­plex­ity that is caus­ing through­out the mobile eco­sys­tem. Man­u­fac­tur­ers, under­stand­ably, seem slow to adopt a com­mon stand­ard and all are try­ing to des­per­ately nur­ture a developer net­work to mimic Apple. How­ever, oper­at­ors and net­work pro­viders are try­ing to lasso developer com­munit­ies together (check out the Whole­sale Applic­a­tion Com­munity to see just how big that groundswell could become) in a dir­ect assault on Apple.

So des­pite the obvi­ous allure of Bar­celona at any time of the year, Mobile World Con­gress 2010 appears to have been a real barn­stormer. Two pre­dic­tions. MWC 2011 will def­in­itely be even more enga­ging as the mobile space con­tin­ues to evolve so fren­et­ic­ally. Lon­don weather in Feb­ru­ary 2011 will be just as shyte. I’ve begun beg­ging for my ticket already.