Mobile World Congress: Summary of the Final Day

After four intensive days of activity, the mobile trade fair par excellence being held in Barcelona drew to a close yesterday. In general, the event has created less headlines than other years but also seen the presentation of more curious and innovative projects.

One of the main stories announced yesterday was SanDisk’s presentation of a microSD card that will be adopted by operators and users alike. The SanDisk Service Delivery Card will allow companies to offer value added services in all types of mobile platforms and devices, where they users can store photos or music, for example.

Kaspersky on the other hand presented Mobile Security 8.0, a solution that protects smartphones particularly from malware, network-based attacks and threats, or SMS spam. The system will also back-up all data stored in mobile devices, so that users have a security copy in the event of theft or loss.

Verizon also revealed that it will start to test a 4G service this year, with a view to launching it at sales points in 25 cities in the United States in 2010. The network will be based on the 700MHz spectrum that the company acquired back in 2008.

The executive director of the Symbian Foundation, Lee Wiliams, assured the trade fair that the group aims to recruit “between 400 and 700 partners” during 2009. At present, they boast 78.

Finally, an anecdote that would usually appear in the crime section of your daily newspaper: the president of Telstra, Sol Trujillo, had his HTC telephone equipped with the recently-presented Windows Mobile 6.5 stolen yesterday. Australian press have stated that there is reason to believe this could be a case of deliberate industrial espionage against Redmond.

Eugene Kaspersky in MWC’09 from NetMediaEurope on Vimeo.