Mobile execs hold S.F. conference
Tuesday opening will conflict with big Apple event
Thousands of mobile phone industry executives will gather for a convention in San Francisco on Tuesday, but they will be focused on another event about 50 miles to the south.
As many as 30,000 people are expected to attend the first Mobile World Congress Americas, which kicks off with a 9 a.m. event at Moscone Convention Center featuring Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Domit.
But in Cupertino at 10 a.m., Apple CEO Tim Cook and other executives will take the stage at the 1,000-seat Steve Jobs Theater — the first use of the theater in Apple’s new “spaceship” complex — to reveal the company’s highly anticipated 10th anniversary iPhone models.
Mobile World Congress Americas organizers recognize that many people at the San Francisco event will be watching Michael O’Hara, chief marketing officer for GSMA, which represents the 26 biggest mobile service operators in the world and is a co-sponsor of the Mobile World Congress Americas the online stream of Apple’s product announcements, which will send ripples through the mobile market.
“We sure wish it wasn’t during the show, but it’s just one of those things we have to deal with,” said Michael O’ Hara, chief marketing officer for GSMA, which represents the 26 biggest mobile service operators in the world and is a co-sponsor of the Mobile World Congress.
The iPhone, which transformed the mobile industry, represented about 63 percent of Apple’s 2016 sales, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. So Apple’s next flagship model, expected to be named the iPhone 8, becomes “an extraordinarily important business story” because the pressure is on the company to prove it can still innovate the way it did under the late Steve Jobs, according to Jeffery Cole, director of USC’s Center for the Digital Future.
“Since Jobs passed away, the only new product has been the Apple Watch, largely a disappointment in the eyes of Apple’s fans,” Cole said by email. “So after a series of new phones that have mostly
been incremental improvements, now Apple’s fans want to know if Apple is still the company that will dazzle them.”
Apple is expected to unveil a “dramatically different” iPhone 8, with a thinner bezel around a larger, brighter organic LED screen, a virtual home button and other technologies that should at least match the latest Samsung phone, the Galaxy Note 8, said Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research.
Apple could also unveil a Watch that works independently of a phone.
Cupertino is bracing for traffic on the streets surrounding the new headquarters, Apple Park. Mayor Savita Vaidhyanathan and Vice Mayor Darcy Paul are expected to be in the audience.
“It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there would be so much excitement around the first event to be held in the Steve Jobs Theater,” Vaidhyanathan said in an email. “Plus, Apple product launch events always receive a lot of attention.”
Dawson said he doesn’t expect as much big news out of Mobile World Congress Americas, which is a far smaller version of the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which drew 108,000 people in late February. The Barcelona conference has featured speakers such as Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The three-day San Francisco event replaces an annual conference sponsored by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, a U.S. trade organization representing wireless carriers. That conference, held the last few years in Las Vegas, had become “something of a backwater event as far as the industry is concerned,” Dawson said.
The cellular industry group is a co-sponsor of Mobile World Congress Americas, which is the first event to use the recently opened portion of Moscone South, although much of that building is still being reconstructed. The conference will also use the North and West halls, with a list of about 1,000 exhibitors including Samsung, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Ericsson, Qualcomm and PayPal.
The conference is meant for industry leaders to network and to discuss major topics, including the rising importance of connected smart devices and of entertainment and other content, O’Hara said.
But at least in the first few hours, the biggest attention-getter will be Apple, Dawson said — “by far.” San Francisco Chronicle
staff writer Wendy Lee contributed to this report.