Given that cold hard plans very rarely tend to be announced outside the confines of the press release, this year's Mobile Entertainment Market (MEM) was never likely to unearth anything concrete, but it did polarise each players' respective take on the current state of play.

Stealing headlines aplenty was Vodafone, with content services director Lee Epting suggesting carriers should sacrifice a share of their app revenue to help support developers.

"We should maybe look at dropping the pants on those rev-share deals and giving it back to the developers to let them monetise it," Epting said at the event.

"In the end, we're about selling tariff plans, and the way we're going to sell tariff plans and differentiate ourselves is by having the best content proposition on the high street or wherever. We don't necessarily have to drive towards revenue for all of that content."

It can be no coincidence that Epting's comments came just as Vodafone itself made a major play for the app market, launching its own app store on Android – 360 Shop.

On the offensive?

Notably more spiky, however, was Nokia, with the firm seemingly using MEM 2010 to take aim at the smartphone's current poster-child – iPhone.

"The future of entertainment is not simply about apps and multi-tasking," Nokia's EVP of sevices Tero Ojanpera said at the event.

"It's about devices that offer truly connected services and learn your habits so well that they can give you what you want. Say goodbye to the apps phone, and say hello to the predictive context device.”

Ojanpera's comments have, naturally, been taken as a slight against Apple.

Instead of offering individual apps, Nokia appears to be making coordination the focus, with Ojanpera highlighting the rise of geo-location in particular.

"Location awareness is the hot new feature that we are seeing in the industry, especially now it's being combined with the capability to continuously transmit your location to friends and family around the world,” he said.

"Your phone will track your location, your friends' location, your schedule, your social graph, what you were doing before, and what you are likely to be doing in the near future."

Social surge?

It was social gaming, rather than location, that was the focus of the final session at MEM 2010, however.

The general feeling of those present was that, while social games such as FarmVille have proved a huge success – Zynga's title reportedly reaching 1 percent of the global population – the genre still has a long way to go.

The two most pertinent points seemed to directly contradict each other, however.

While Tim Harrison from The Mobile Consultancy noted that Tetris – the most unsociable game ever – remains the most popular title, Aaron Rattue of GfK Retail & Technology noted that social games are reaching out to new audiences.

"On FarmVille, 65 percent of players are female," he concluded.

"You're turning a lot of people onto playing games online, even if they're not what we would think of as games."
Mobile Entertainment