Over the past years, we’ve usually wrote articles from Mobile World Congress. The event takes place every year in February at Barcelona and it’s populated with gadgets and announcements. Unfortunately, year-over-year event’ glow started to fade away and it doesn’t have the same interest it had in the past. It’s not a surprise since companies started to announce their products by organizing their own events.
If I remember well, two years ago Samsung was unveiling Galaxy S II smartphone, during a MWC 2011 conference. This year was different. Sure, there were some released, but none of them were very important. I appreciate what LG did this year at MWC, because they had the courage to make some interesting announcements: they bought WebOS from HP and plan to incorporate it in Smart TVs, they brought Optimus F7 and F5 phones and demoed a 4K UltraHD streaming from a phone to a TV.
In other words, not pretty much happened during MWC. Here’s what was interesting:
– Samsung showed Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet, which was previously announced days ago and announced that BadaOS will be transformed into Tizen. It also announced a new phone Samsung Knox, which is meant for personal and business use and confirmed that Samsung Galaxy S IV will be announced on March 14th.
– Sony showed everybody Xperia Tablet Z tablet, Xperia Z/ZL smartphone and announced (together with Telefonica) that they will release Firefox OS phones in the near future.
– HP surprised everyone at MWC by announcing their first Android tablet, called Slate 7. It’s a cheap tablet that wants to compete against Nexus 7, Kindle Fire and other tablets.
– Nokia came at MWC with Lumia 720 at MWC, which seems to be a mid-range phone and two low-cost phones – 105 and 301 models who are big, yet simple phones.
– Acer came at MWC with two Android phones that look similar with the Galaxy Nexus design: Liquid E1 and Liquid Z2.
– Mozilla made an interesting appearance at MWC because we had the opportunity to see how Firefox OS works. The phones that run Firefox OS were ZTE Open and Alcatel OneTouch Fire. I don’t know what to say about the OS, but on a first look it looks not on par with today’s requirements. But it’s just the start.
– LG also brought some devices we’ve seen in the past like Optimus G Pro and the second generation of L 7, L 5, L 3 phones. They also said they have plans to release Firefox OS phones in the future.
– Huawei announced a new flagship phone, called Ascend P2.
– ASUS also came at MWC with an interesting hybrid idea – Padfone Infinity, a phone that can be docked into a tablet and an Intel Atom based tablet, called Fonepad.
As we see, this year at MWC we didn’t have the sparkle we all expected(or perhaps wanted), but that’s not MWC fault. It’s because companies are slowly starting to invest more resources into their own on-stage presentations and run away from trade-shows like CES or MWC. This is quickly starting to extend and in the future we might witness even more bizarre announcements during these trade-shows. It appears the next big thing is to announce a product before a trade-show or to make an announcement during the trade show that you’ll going to launch a new product soon. This could be the end of the trade-shows, although I hope I am wrong.
