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NEW ORLEANS - Wireless-industry marketers might have felt a little disoriented last week when they entered CTIA's Wireless 2005 show, here, and they could not blame it on Bourbon Street excesses.
Wireless 2005 combined the look and feel of In rernational CES, the Photo Marketing Association Show and a National Association of Broadcasters event.
Exhibitors demonstrated wireless streaming audio services, MP3 playback, mobile TV services and broadband-quality Web browsing and downloading. They talked more about megapixels, compressed-audio codecs and video frame rates and less about talktime and memory locations
The faces in the crowds changed as much as the technologies and presentations. New handset suppliers turning up to exhibit for the first time included Amoi, BenQ and Group Sense. New infrastructure supplier Huawei also showed handsets and is weighing an entry into the U.S. market. All hail from China or Taiwan, as do two new Audiovox suppliers: UTStarcom, which recently bought Audiovox, and Hisense. Both are from China, as is Haier, which exhibited for the second time.
New services on display included a streaming stereo-music service from Mobzilla of La Jolla, Calif, and DVB-H (digital video broadcasting-handheld), a technology that optimizes existing TV programming for transmission to handheld devices, including future cellphones. To demonstrate the service, Nokia teamed up with Pittsburgh-based Crown Castle, which is upgrading its national network of communications towers to...