Every year, during these first three months, we get to see the outcome of two huge annual cell-phone conferences. Mobile World Congress, which is the largest, took place February 15-18 in Barcelona. International CTIA Wireless 2010 should be the biggest cellular event in the U.S., and it’s scheduled this year for March 25-27 in Las Vegas. I missed MWC this year but will be at CTIA later this month.

Big Deals in Barcelona

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About 49,000 attendees showed up at MWC this year. This is up from last year’s 47,000 but less than the 55,000 or so of previous years. The downturn is still affecting turnout despite the better than average showing of the cellular industry during 2009. The real indicator, however, is that the number of vendors was down significantly, from about 1300 this year compared to 1800 last year. In any case, MWC is still one of the largest conferences in the world. It brings together all the major players like the carriers, operators, equipment manufacturers, software companies, Internet companies, media and entertainment companies, and government groups.

The show’s range of topics covered is enormous but a few stand out. For example, I thought that the emphasis was on mobile operating systems (OSs) this year. During the show, Microsoft introduced Windows Mobile 7 with its new user interface. The Zune media player and Xbox features also should help it stand out. Meanwhile, Google’s Android OS seemed to be on almost every handset vendor’s products at the show.

The other big announcement was the new OS from Intel and Nokia, which merged their Mobilin and Maemo software to form MeeGo, targeting smart phones as well as notebooks, tablets, and other mobile devices. Also, Nokia reinforced its recent announcement that its Symbian OS is now fully open source. It seems to me that there are too many OSs, but with more than 1 billion devices sold each year, maybe that’s okay.

The Samsung Wave uses the company’s bada operating system.

Current issues also were discussed at MWC. Long-Term Evolution (LTE) remains hot. Expect the initial rollouts of this 4G technology this year. Verizon has committed to setting up 25 to 30 LTE networks in major markets in 2010. While it isn’t the first company to deploy LTE, Verizon seems to be taking an aggressive stance to be a major LTE player. It indicated that data speeds should average 5 to 12 Mbits/s downlink and 2 to 5 Mbits/s uplink. Most of the initial data devices will probably be dongles and data cards with handsets to follow. We can expect to see other LTE rollouts across the world with handsets to come later in the year.