What a week to start The Gadget Show. Trying to keep up with everything that’s going on at 3GSM World Congress 2005 is a task and a half, interviewing a few more people for the show, keeping Gadget Lounge ticking along, working my day job, and keeping a 13 month old happy is consuming every hour in the day.

That being said, it’s been great to hear some of the annoucements made this week, as it’s now pretty obvious that mobile phones are moving toward the ubiquitous personal device that’s been touted as the holy grail for the last decade. I’m not talking about camera phones, that’s a given! Forget your simple little digital cam, that’s been absorbed into the phone already. It’s only a matter of time that phones provide greater than 3 megapixel CCDs, which seems to be the sweet spot. I’m not even talking about PDA devices, that’s been absorbed as well. Looking at IDC’s recent report on the decline in PDA sales seems to add weight to this logic. What’s more compelling, and what we’ve seen this week at the 3GSM conference, are truly personal consumer services aimed outside the business use of the device. Evidence of this is Nokia’s collaboration with Microsoft on media formats, their Loudeye product for service providers, Motorola’s first iTunes compatible mobile and Push-to-View.

Later in the year we’ll see hard drives added to mobile phones, just like the one Toshiba are talking about, or the one Samsung has already announced. There is no doubt that big brands like Nokia and Motorola will eat market share from PDAs, digital cameras, and music players, and compelling software and services will quickly follow.

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