Guardian communications editor Richard Wray is in Barcelona this week for 3GSM - the mobile industry's annual get-together. Thankfully for us, he's reporting back every day for Technology Blog - click here for his updates.
Nokia got the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona off to a typically jargon-fuelled start, unveiling some new phones, banging on about enterprise solutions - at which point I nearly nodded off - and taking the chance to have a pop at the iPhone.
Chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told a packed house that he welcomed the iPhone but suggested it was merely following Nokia?s lead in producing a phone that does more than make calls and send texts.
"What Apple has done is definitely a great illustration of the fact that multi-purpose converged devices are taking share from single-purpose devices," he said. "I think Apple's entry into the marketplace is going to stimulate the market a lot."
With one eye on the coverage that Steve Jobs got last month he added rather snootily that "What we need to see is Apple turning mindshare into market share".
Nokia also took the opportunity to plug its mobile TV solution - a pared-down version of the broadcast signal called DVB-H - as it revealed a new handset, the N77, designed to bring the service to the masses.
Unveiling the candy-bar phone, Nokia showed a corporate video one can only hope is not going to be the bedrock upon which it will build its advertising campaign. It centred around two football fans - one watching TV at home with the air of a man who has not had a girlfriend for years - the other one sliding a rather expensive looking set of Bose noise cancelling headphones over his trendy be-gelled hairdo and wandering around town. Why he suddenly decided to go out was unclear.
It's also worth noting that the town into which he walked - which had the air of one of those generic European cities which have trams and trendy young women who think it's wonderful to have some tech-laden youth thrust a camera phone at them rather than giving him a withering "what a loser" look; the sort of washed-out metropolis you see on those dire T-Mobile Flext ads - was surprisingly devoid of traffic, except a fleeting glimpse of tram; which explains why he did not get run over, especially as his headphones would have blocked out the hooting of irate drivers. He also did not walk into a lamppost while squinting at the small screen on his phone.
Anyway, one question raised during the press conference was why Nokia is putting so much effort into mobilising TV when people seem to be switching off linear broadcasting in favour of on-demand content - and shows pinched off the internet. The answer given by Jonas Geust, Nokia's head of multimedia was that on-demand content is 'complimentary' to mobile TV. That may go someway to explaining why Nokia also announced a tie-up with YouTube - hasn't everyone? - to bring video clips to mobiles.
DVB-H is going head to head, of course, with a competing technology from US chip design firm Qualcomm called MediaFLO. Nokia's executives made sure that every time they mentioned DVB-H they said "an open platform" in the same breath.
That's a not very subtle dig at Qualcomm - with whom Nokia is locked in an increasingly acrimonious legal dispute over the technology behind 3G services - who Nokia want everyone to think is trying to stitch up the market.
The mobile phone operators, always looking to keep the world's largest handset maker onside, have jumped on the DVB-H bandwagon (though American mobile phone network AT&T Wireless/Cingular announced that it will be using the Qualcomm system for a mobile TV service later this year).
But content owners are not so partisan. Sky, for instance, seems rather enamoured of the MediaFLO system and released the results of the second of its UK trials to coincide with the first day of 3GSM. If the results are correct, MediaFLO can push out twice as many channels as DVB-H over the same distance from a mast, or go twice as far with the same number of channels. That means operators can either offer more choice, or spend less money cluttering up cities with yet more mobile phone masts. (See here for the results).
