I was planning on liveblogging Eric Schmidt’s keynote speech here at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but a serious lack of any kind of Internet connectivity threw a wrench into those plans. I’m not too bummed about it though, because the whole thing was frankly quite boring.
Apart from some history lessons about the convergence of telecommunications and cloud computing, all we really got from Schmidt and fellow Googlers was that Android handsets are now seeing over 60,000 shipments on a daily basis, and some previews of add-on features for existing Google mobile products that were cool but not earth-shattering in any way.
I’m sure it’s nice for German speakers that they’ll soon be able to search Google using their voice in their native language, and the upcoming real-time translation element for Google Goggles is impressive.
But having Google’s Chairman and CEO fly over to Spain to mostly read from his notes and basically tell the audience of 1500 people (and many more thanks to the live video streaming) that mobile is going to be big and that the company is very committed to making its mark? Nothing short of underwhelming.
The question is: does it matter, really?
Having had numerous conversations with developers, handset manufacturers, mobile software companies and yes, even operators at this show, I get the feeling Schmidt really didn’t have to make a big splash at the event.
Android is taking care of that job quite nicely, and I’m sure that’s just the way Schmidt likes it.
I have more thoughts on this that I’ll post shortly, but I would also invite you to check out MG Siegler’s take, which is slightly more critical than most of the stuff I’ve heard about Google and its Android plans here at MWC.
