Devices Move to the Front of the Aisle at WiMAX World

I spent last week in Chicago at the WiMAX World Show. Having gone to many wireless shows over the years, I have gotten to witness the evolution of WiMAX. Without a doubt the market evolution is happening at an increasingly fast and positive rate.
Less than eighteen months ago these shows were dominated by talk of "will WiMAX actually work" and "concerns over intellectual property rights." With over 275 global deployments, questions of WiMAX working from a technology standpoint have quieted. Sure there will still be glitches as large scale commercial deployments roll out, but that is to be expected with any new technology. The market has evolved past that stage. The talk is no longer about whether WiMAX will work, but what will work on WiMAX.
It used to be at these shows vendors pushed their base stations to the front of the aisle. Base stations were the big draw. Consumer premise equipment (CPE) and other consumer devices were barely seen. When they were on the floor it was usually at the back of the display as a part of a large reference design mockup. Not long ago most WiMAX CPE was represented by a circuit board in a plexiglass box, about the size of a large suitcase. This was not the case last week in Chicago.
The CPE devices on display looked like something somebody would actually have in their house. The form factors were reasonable in proximity to those found with cable and DSL modems. More encouraging for WiMAX was that real working mobile devices were at the show.
Laptop cards and USB devices were everywhere. Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung took mobile devices a step further. Each had at least one mobile consumer electronic device demoed on the floor. Motorola showed a mockup of a dual mode cellular/WiMAX phone. The company even put the phone through its paces by having it handle a base-station to base-station handoff during a night-time boat ride. Expectations are for dual mode phones to be commercially available from Sprint by the end of 2008 or the beginning of 2009. Samsung in South Korea is already selling its dual mode phone. Beyond phones, South Korean vendor FLYVO had an online gaming device at the show.
At about the size of an iPHONE, the FLYVO G100 supports multi-media files, gaming and Web surfing. Like the iPHONE it uses a touch screen. The G100 supports Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and Bluetooth. It also comes with a USB connection, allowing the device to act as a laptop modem. Barry West, head of Sprint's WiMAX group, has WiMAX embedded devices being central to his strategy.
From the looks of things in Chicago he is not too far off, with vendors making great strides toward delivering those devices. This represents an important evolutionary milestone as devices enable the next crucial step, network users.