Around 2005-2006, the mobile phone market was booming. Double digit annual growth had become the new norm and the race between companies was about UI novelty, distribution channel, phone industrial and mechanical design and time-to-market. Then five things happened at the same time:

1. ARM came with a promise of a new CPU architecture, the CORTEX Ax family, which would significantly increase processing capabilities of the underlying HW.
2. 3G Cellular Network deployments accelerated providing important improvement to data rates available for the consumer on their mobile devices.
3. “High-Level Operating Systems” started to appear – allowing the user out of the Operator’s “walled-garden”.
4. Chinese cellular networks started rapidly deploying and led to the creation of a large amount of local phone makers and brands.
5. Taiwanese and Chinese semiconductor makers started feeding the market with new business models providing extremely fast time-to-market with impressively lower cost than the competition. Differentiation on the UI was not important to this new market – getting the phones out quickly to the millions of new users was the name of the game.

Those developments led to the quick commoditization of what would become known as the “feature phone” platforms.

Fast forward to 2013

Walking around the show, it hit me that we are re-living very similar events. Devices seem to be all very similar in functionality; as a result, functionality innovation is moving fast up the chain value from the phone makers to the application and service providers.

The convergence of digital technologies has changed the face of the Mobile World Congress.

Walking around the Samsung booth, it was clear that it was not only just about phones or tablets anymore. It’s also about computers and cameras, TV and OTT streamers…The common denominator of all the products is the services that the OEM is driving to the end user.

As a consumer, just as all PCs ended up looking the same, all the tablets and phones are starting to look the same. Has it become so difficult to innovate on the products themselves?

Part of the answer is the lack of ability of the platform providers to enable ground-up innovation to their customers. Moving from dual-cores to quad-cores did not deliver on the promise of real improvement of performances and capabilities for the consumer. The race of cores and new CPUs is a dead-end without a real breakthrough of the base technology.

If our competitors continue to want to apply Moore’s law they are soon going to be in big trouble. It was visible that every person visiting our hospitality suite at MWC understood this watching our demos!

Our NovaThor L8580 beats any competing platform you throw at it, not only in performance, but also in power and integration. With the most advanced LTE modem architecture it is very simple: with ST-Ericsson platforms, OEMs and customers have more bang for their buck.

FD-SOI and Thor modem architecture are driving the most amazing and important innovation in wireless platforms this market has seen in a while. And it is such a great feeling of satisfaction to be part of this innovation.