After a weeklong schedule of jam-packed meetings with communication service providers (CSPs), OEMs, and etailers/retailers, and some great Jamón Ibérico, I believe it is fair to say that this Mobile World Congress was in many ways much more effective for the broader wireless ecosystem than prior ones.

Indeed the GSMA content team played a big role in providing this result by exposing issues, frictions and opportunities created from an ecosystem that is transitioning from connectivity to device centricity.

It was inspiring to see both CSPs (i.e.: Glen Lurie from AT&T and Vittorio Colao from Vodafone) and OEMs (i.e.:  Ray Roman from DELL, Eric Schmidt from Google) lay out their different strategies to win in this brave new world.

Within the connected devices arena, two key developments caught our attention during the show:

• Smart Phones at its Apex:  Whether it was Colao (Vodafone) discussing the 40 percent growth in smartphone shipments that he’d seen in Q4, or  Schmidt (Google) touting sixty thousand Android devices shipped per day, it is clear that smartphones are driving the bulk of the category growth yet still have a long runway ahead of them.  For reference, smartphones in North America and Europe have around 20 to 25 percent share of total handset shipments whereas in Japan it is 52 percent.

• Continued Momentum for Connected Devices:  Indeed the momentum for connected devices continues at full force. Both T-Mobile’s announcement to launch a connected device competence centers combined with Ericsson’s press conference in which they announced research that estimated 50 billion connected devices by 2020, highlighted this momentum.  Furthermore, GSMA’s announcement of industry guidelines to reduce design complexity and fragmentation in embedded mobile devices, underlined this trend.

As we had said leading into this event, we were excited about some of the changes that we were seeing in the way that this 2010 MWC was being structured (i.e.: “less homogeneous playing field with more degrees of freedom”).  Doing this obviously paid off for both GSMA and the broader ecosystem. Hopefully we’ll see more of this at CTIA.