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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.

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