MWC 2012 has come and gone. The largest one to date with 67,000 attendees including 12,500 developers! Below is a list of some of the developer news that came from MWC.

BlackBerry
It wasn't top secret information that BlackBerry was giving away PlayBooks to all those who attended their developer's conference and it was clearly one of the items that attributed to their 3 completely full sessions. Regardless, it was a good opportunity to let everyone know there is success in building on the BlackBerry platform, with 13% of devs making over $100 000. READ MORE

Nokia

The big announcement around Nokia was the Qt based Nokia 808 PureView with a 41MP sensor combined with Carl Zeiss optics and a xenon flash. Now if you aren't into creating camera apps, this phone doesn't offer many advantages, but it will be certainly interesting to see how many they do sell and how large of a market are interesting in purchasing a phone with a high-end camera built in. READ MORE

Windows Phone
It was all about getting into more markets for Windows. With the release of Tango (WP7.5), which removes, a few features but allows the platform to run on 256MB of RAM. OEM's like ZTE can create lower cost devices for cheaper markets. In conjunction with this announcement, the Windows Phone SDK was updated to 7.1.1 and gives an emulator to test how your apps run and install on lower memory devices. READ MORE

Intel
Intel came to MWC with a series of different offerings. With sessions on HTML5 & building apps for Windows / Ultrabooks. They also had a booth that was more Android specific, in preparation for the phone they announced (codenamed Santa Clara) to arrive in stores in summer on the Orange network.
READ MORE for some new developer tools they announced.

Samsung Bada

Samsung reassured developers that Bada isn't going away anytime soon, launching a revamped developers portal just the week prior to Mobile World Congress. Along with showing off their newest Bada devices (Samsung Wave 3 and Wave Y), Samsung also announced the new Bada 2.0 SDK at its Developer Conference.

READ MORE for specific features of the new SDK.

   

Worthy Mentions  

• HTC announced 4 new APIs
• Mozilla showed off the new open web platform, Boot 2 Gecko and a web app store
• Facebook announced plans to work with operators to help streamline payments flow by reducing steps for users to complete transactions.

Consumption of network resources - AKA data traffic - is becoming a huge issue for operators, who are passing things down the line to developers. As operators move to limit their customers' data consumption, issues arise for developers: will consumers cut back on app usage for fear of hitting their limits? Will operators try to clamp down on bandwidth-intensive apps? 

There are some drastic options available, including 

potentially even trying to charge developers for the data their apps consume.

At our WIPJam@MWC, we conducted a survey along with our friends at the IWPC to try and get a better handle on how developers gauge their apps' data usage, and got a great response - so thanks to everyone who took part! The results were a little bit surprising: we found that over half of the developers surveyed don't do any sort of network usage test at all! With operators looking to clamp down on data usage, this could be a real problem. 

But it's not just an operator issue, it effects consumers as well. For instance, Sam Ramji from Apigee posted on Twitter that a single check-in on Foursquare consumed 739KB of data on his iPhone. He was roaming internationally at the time, meaning that action cost him $14.75. This may be an extreme example, but it illustrates how bloated data use can have a real impact on consumers.

Keep an eye on this topic as it will only intensify through the rest of the year. If you're not already looking into how to streamline your apps' data usage - or if you don't have any idea how much data they're using - this is a great time to start!   

Recently GSMA has started a Smarter App Challenge to incentivise developers to create more data efficient mobile apps. They have included a good set of guidelines and the opportunity to win cash and other rewards, including a trip to Mobile Asia Expo. More information can be found here.

WIP will be presenting the findings of the suvey on the topic at the upcoming IWPC conference, Improving Always-On Smartphone/Tablet Power Management and User Experience, March 26/29 in Seattle, WA. We will fill you in on the discussion and any outcome.