CTIA Wrap-Up: Apps and Keyboards Stand Out

At this year's relatively quiet CTIA wireless industry trade show, two major themes popped out: everybody's got to have a keyboard, and everybody has to have apps.

Both the show floor and the exhibitors at CTIA lacked energy, but that isn't a reflection of the mobile phone world, one of the few bright spots in today's grim economy. Everybody was just bone-tired after CES in January and the huge blockbuster Mobile World Congress in February, which have bled together with CTIA to become a sort of gray haze of trade shows all through the first quarter of the year. I love trade shows, but three in three months is too many. CTIA suffers from coming third.

The mania for apps and platforms also awakens a debate that the big carriers have been pushing: are there too many mobile platforms out there, and how many are too many? Verizon and AT&T feel that fragmentation is slowing down innovation, because programmers have to pick between six different OSes. But I don't see any of those OSes giving up the ghost any time soon - unless Android fails to truly make it out of the gate. I'm starting to get really worried about those guys.

The big loser at CTIA, once again, was Google Android. RIM and Microsoft were out in force, and the Symbian OS made a great win with the new Nokia E71x phone on AT&T. But Android was once again a no-show, causing many analysts to wonder if there's something wrong with Google's OS that it's taking so long to proliferate.