The US has moved ahead of Europe and Asia to become a clear leader in the mobile phone industry, according to the chief technology officer of AT&T.
“I get so tired of hearing that [ we are far behind Europe and Asia],” John Donovan told the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco.
“I think the last three years the US has been a clear leader as it relates to phones, their designs, operating systems and applications.”
Mr Donovan was speaking at a conference where advances by Silicon Valley companies – Apple, Google with its Android operating system and Palm and its webOS – were at the forefront of discussions.
Phil McKinney, chief technology officer of HP, told attendees that his company’s purchase of Palm this month – the $1.2bn deal closed on July 1 – was prompted by its need to control the end-to-end experience and owning Palm’s webOS operating system would help it achieve this.
The operating system would feature not only in smartphones, but also in tablets, netbooks and printers, he said. HP was investing more in Palm’s research and development and marketing in order to “scale the Palm organisation.”
Palm’s biggest smartphone rival, the iPhone, got a thumbs down on Monday from the watchdog Consumer Reports. It said it could not recommend the iPhone4 after its engineers confirmed a design defect that affected reception if a spot on the lower left side of the phone was covered.
“The tests also indicate that AT&T’s network might not be the primary suspect in the iPhone 4′s much-reported signal woes,” it said.
That should come as some relief to Mr Donovan, who was asked the inevitable question about what was causing AT&T’s much publicised network problems where smartphone users suffer slow and often lost connections.
“It’s been a little something of everything,” he said, after bringing up charts forecasting data and video use over networks are exploding over the next few years.
The growth was so dramatic that, by 2014, the total traffic carried in 2008 rounded to zero in comparison, he said, pointing to a bar chart where 2008 was the tiniest stump. By 2013, video would be 90 per cent of consumer data traffic, he predicted.
Everyone was trying to play catch-up and bring out the latest smartphone features and newest apps onto networks, to the extent that the traditional methods of testing and managing the process had broken down.
“It’s been a challenge, but the things [that have not been lacking] are capital and conviction and commitment, because we will move heaven and earth to get out in front of this demand, we really view this as a critical time for the industry,” he said.
