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.

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Series Supported by Snapdragon by Qualcomm

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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.

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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.