Quick Tour Around The World: Mobile World Congress

Showing posts with label Mobile World Congress. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

What Happened Tuesday at Mobile World Congress

The Mobile World Congress Series is supported by Snapdragon by Qualcomm. Inside your smartphone beats the heart of a dragon.

This being Barcelona, it seems fitting that day two of Mobile World Congress kicked off with a little ChaCha and Salsa. Those are the names of HTC’s new phones with Facebook buttons (not to be confused with the so-called Facebook phone from INQ, which can only be viewed by appointment, behind glass and beyond a velvet rope). HTC deluged the show with six products in all, five Android phones and a 7-inch Android tablet, the Flyer.
HTC wasn’t alone. Everyone seems to be joining the Android tablet party. Samsung and LG unveiled theirs yesterday; today it was the turn of HTC, Huwei and ViewSonic. Huwei’s entry was the Ideos Slim S7, which as the name suggests is yet another 7-inch tablet, running the very retro Android 2.2. ViewSonic, which already offers 7-inch and 10-inch tablets, launched a 4.1-inch ViewPad, also running Android 2.2. Which begs the question: How small can a tablet get before it’s simply a large smartphone with connectivity disabled?
Riding high on the waves of Android adulation at the show — there’s even an entire “Android village” stuffed with giant green robot icons, one of which you can slide down — outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage for his keynote address. He promised updates to the Android OS every six months or so, and that from now on, Google would combine the best features of the smartphone OS and the tablet OS. Which could well mean a lot more blurring of the lines between tablet and phone. Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson has been blurring the lines between phone and PlayStation, and we took a look at the result.

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LG Optimus 3D

Formula One Racecar

Motorola Pro

NTT Docomo

NTT Docomo

Panasonic Lumix

Samsung Galaxy S Wi-Fi 5.0

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Series Supported by Snapdragon by Qualcomm

The Mobile World Congress Series is supported by Snapdragon by Qualcomm. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset platform is redefining mobility by offering an optimal combination of mobile processing performance, powerful multimedia, wireless connectivity and power efficiency. The Snapdragon family of chipsets is designed to power a new generation of advanced smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices.

Monday at Mobile World Congress …

by Chris Taylor

The Mobile World Congress Series is supported by Snapdragon by Qualcomm. Inside your smartphone beats the heart of a dragon.

Barcelona’s greatest annual tech event, Mobile World Congress, opened today under a couple of clouds. There was the raincloud above the conference, held in the shadow of the National Palace, where attendees scurried from hall to hall toting umbrellas along with their mobiles.
And there was the figurative cloud of Friday’s Microsoft-Nokia deal, which many attendees felt sucked a lot of oxygen out of the event. Few observers seemed truly enthusiastic about a deal to put Windows 7 on a new breed of future phones from smartphone laggard Nokia. Even Steve Ballmer seemed subdued when introducing his new partner, Stephen Elsop, to Ballmer’s keynote crowd. Ballmer kept an odd distance at the other end of the stage and looked down pensively while the Nokia CEO spoke.
Despite the clouds, the Congress soldiered on — with demos, video walls full of content and carefully-orchestrated stunts. Samsung gamely plugged its second Android Tablet, the Galaxy Tab 10.1, which we found underwhelming, along with a large-screen smartphone, the Galaxy S Wifi 5.0, pictured above. LG had a booth full of glasses-free 3D phones that regularly ran out of a charge while playing battery-killing 3D games. (The company also offered a tablet that does require glasses for its 3D; we’ll bring you a closer look tomorrow.)

Meanwhile, a team of “fashion police” were found issuing “citations” for attendees who carried more than one mobile device. It turned out to be a stunt for Good Technology, which apparently plans to outlaw the need to carry both a work phone and a home phone. For those seeking more intellectual stimulation, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo offered an interesting look at how all this technology can be used to clear storm clouds of a different kind: dictatorship.

Series Supported by Snapdragon by Qualcomm

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Twitter CEO: Why There Won’t Be a “Twitter Phone”

by Chris Taylor

When Twitter CEO Dick Costolo gave his keynote at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday, he didn’t intend to launch a new product. He didn’t come to reveal his finances (Twitter is “making money,” he said, declining to specify whether it was profit or revenue), and he casually denied rumors that Google was going to buy the company for $10 billion.
Instead, Costolo came to explain how he thinks the Twitter brand works best: when it’s invisible, and everywhere.
In response to a questioner who referenced the so-called “Facebook phone” and the INQ, and asked if he could ever see a Twitter-branded smartphone, Costolo’s answer was short and sweet: No.
“Twitter already works on every device you’re going to hear about this week,” Costolo told the audience of mobile industry elites. “Tweets flow seamlessly across platforms; that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Throughout his hour-long address, Costolo compared Twitter to water — a utility so useful and ubiquitous, we almost forget it’s there. We don’t need to re-learn how to use it in different contexts.
And in the case of Egypt, where the country-wide protest lost access to Twitter as part of a wider Internet blackout, Costolo said, “People in the desert will always find a way to water.” (Indeed, Google and Twitter provided a voice-to-tweet service that kept protesters in touch.)
That’s why there will never, under Costolo’s leadership, be such a thing as a “Twitter phone”. Water doesn’t need branding. It’s water. Everyone needs it every day. It isn’t just mobile (just 40% of Twitter users use it on a phone, Costelo revealed). It may be bigger than mobile, in some measures.
So perhaps Costolo, despite his protestations, did launch a new product today — the invisible, indispensable tech company, one that is less about the tweeting of birds, and more about the flowing of water.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Leaked Images Of Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″ & Galaxy S II [PICS]

by Charlie White

Shortly after that leak of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″ specs, now there are new pictures of the new tablet and the Galaxy S2 smartphone, too.
Along with these pics comes confirmation of those specs we reported on earlier — the 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab has an 8-megapixel camera with HD recording and playback, 1200 x 800 resolution, and runs the Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) OS.
The 8.49mm-thin Samsung Galaxy S II Smartphone doesn’t have the 1.2 GHz dual-core processor rumored before, but according to Samsung Hub it has a 1GHz dual core processor, weighs just over 4 ounces, and has a a 4.27-inch AMOLED WVGA display.
We have the pics, we have the numbers, and now we have boots on the ground in Barcelona — Mashable’s Chris Taylor and Stan Schroeder will have first-hand reports about these two devices and many more from Barcelona all week.

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Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1"

Samsung Galaxy S II

Samsung Galaxy Tab, Shot 2

Samsung Galaxy S II, Leaked Pic

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and S II Smartphone

Images courtesy of Samsung Hub