Barcelona, Spain | February 27 - March 1, 2012
As 60,000 people flooded Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, multiple bars and restaurants were suddenly hit by wave after wave of men (it’s mostly men) in blue and grey suits. The suits at MWC are there to do one thing. Sell mobile base stations to each other, get carrier partnerships for their new Latin American MVNO (or similar), and generally be those mobile corporate drones that… → Read More
Way back in the days of Android yore, the stock browser got the job done but did so with a minimum of flair. Now there’s no shortage of first-rate mobile browsers out there, but mobile browser war mainstay Dolphin has just released a new update that packs an equally new (and nifty) feature: it’s called Sonar, and it lets you navigate the web with your voice.
Once the update is installed, a… → Read More
Tired of just hearing about Windows 8 all the time? Well then, you’re in luck — Microsoft has finally released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview to the public, so people outside of the tech bubble finally have the chance to take Redmond’s new OS for a spin. → Read More
Accessibility has become quite the theme here at Mobile World Congress: Nokia and ZTE have announced new low-cost devices to bring push Windows Phone into developing markets, and Google chairman Eric Schmidt highlighted the importance of connecting all people.
Sweden-based Doro is trying to help in their own way — the company has recently pulled back the curtain on the PhoneEasy 740, an… → Read More
We’ve been trawling Barcelona for apps and startups during Mobile World Congress, so here’s a little round-up of some of those that have been plying their wares – many of whom don’t have the cash to exhibit at the official Congress, but who are pitching like mad in the hotel bars of Barcelona.
BearCare from Tagofjoy is an Augmented Reality game with a freemium business model. In the game you… → Read More
The number of people in the world has now reached 7 billion people, but the number that have been online are only at 2 billion, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, said today at a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
“We need to be realists about technology,” he said. The future, most easily, belongs to “ultra connected people” who can embrace the future of… → Read More
iZettle, the Swedish mobile payments startup that basically competes with Square, has gone live on the App store in the Nordic markets today (Denmark, Norway and Finland). It’s making 5,000 card reader devices available in each country. They’ve also appointed a UK managing director, Stewart Roberts. Stewart was former Director of Global Innovation at Barclaycard. A launch in the UK is therefore… → Read More
After hearing that Huawei had revealed “the world’s fastest smartphone” in the form of the Ascend D Quad, we knew we had to seek it out. Well, we finally managed to score a little hands-on time with the Chinese company’s newest device, and we didn’t come away disappointed. → Read More
It was over a year ago that Nokia and Microsoft announced their partnership to make Windows Phone the primary operating system for Nokia’s smartphones. But the real test in the consumer market starts now, the first full year of Nokia selling its new handsets, with a portfolio of four models shipping in a range of markets, including China.
Stephen Elop, the CEO of Nokia, is all too aware of… → Read More
The Padfone is a peculiar beast, to be sure. Given the right accessories (and enough money, I suppose), Asus’s newest smartphones can easily transform into a tablet and a faux-notebook in the blink of an eye, but how well does the thing work? Asus was kind enough to let us play with one for a short while in their booth here at Mobile World Congress, and we’ve put together a quick video for your… → Read More
Viacom’s MTV is making one more move into trying to capture the youth market on the platform where it’s increasingly spending most of its time: the company, in partnership with digital agency AKQA, has launched “Under The Thumb,” a new social TV app.
MTV and Viacom are calling this a “world first” in that it will let users watch MTV content on the mobile, share it on the go with others, and… → Read More
Mobile browser company Opera — which claims to be the world’s largest, with 160 million monthly users — today announced two more developments in its drive to make more money from mobile: today it is launching its own payment exchange for its Mobile Store app store; and it has named its first regional partner for the service, Yandex, which will become the preferred method of payment in Russia and… → Read More
My first reaction upon hearing about Nokia’s 41-megapixel 808 Pureview was that it was an absurdity, a perfect example of the very worst of consumer electronics, and a total miss. But the more I read, the better I understood that this phone isn’t just some freak of nature with a ridiculously high number attached to it. It’s just the slightly awkward first steps of a serious move by Nokia to… → Read More
Wow. We expected a lot of news out of Mobile World Congress but who knew HTC would have so. freaking. much.
I was having trouble keeping track of it myself, so for the good of the both of us, I thought it might be fitting to bundle all this news up into something a tad more easily digestible.
And off we go… → Read More
Only yesterday we reported that Evi, a new iPhone (iTunes link) and Android app (link) which was incredibly Siri-like – and some say it’s better – had gotten a call from Apple that it was about to be pulled from the App store. Why? For being – as far as we could figure out – too much like Siri, and maybe, well, just too good.
Today, the buzz at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is that Apple… → Read More
It’s not nice to knock a company when it’s down, but I had a briefing earlier today in Barcelona with Alec Saunders, the head of developer relations at RIM, which — depending on whether you support RIM or not — either speaks to the company’s new, original attack on the market, or a sign of why it won’t succeed.
The bottom line is that RIM, in a way, seems to think that size doesn’t… → Read More
Facebook, currently in a quiet period as it prepares for its IPO, is stone-cold silent on whether it really will ever launch a mobile device, and whether it plans to launch mobile advertising to complement its main revenue driver on desktops.
But that does not mean it is sitting still on mobile — the company’s biggest area of growth at the moment.
In an interview today in Barcelona with… → Read More
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Visa announced a new over-the-air provisioning service for smartphones for use with Visa’s payWave mobile payments system. The service will make it easier for operators, banks and even transit operators to link Visa payment accounts to consumers’ smartphones, the company says.
Although perhaps not as exciting as news of a mobile wallet “app” in consumers’… → Read More
Nokia’s announcement of the Symbian Belle-powered 808 PureView and its 41-megapixel camera took many (including me) by surprise this morning, and there were more than a few demo photos being thrown up during the presentation.
I got the chance to play with the 808 earlier this morning, but the inside of the Fira Montjuic’s Hall 5 didn’t provide the best vistas to photograph (I really wish I… → Read More
I’m no great fan of Samsung’s 5+ inch Galaxy Note — it’s just too darned big for me to use the way I want to. The Galaxy Note 10.1 on the other hand pumps up size to a more familiar level, and the end result is a tablet/stylus combo that makes a lot more sense. → Read More
Isis, the carrier-led joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today new partnerships with Chase, Capital One and Barclaycard. Under the terms of the deal, the banks will include their debit, credit and prepaid cards into Isis’s forthcoming mobile wallet.
In addition, the organization is revealing, for the first time, what the… → Read More
At The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, StumbleUpon, the veteran content discovery platform, will be announcing “its first major integration with Android,” says Co-founder Garrett Camp. What does that mean? Well, nearly as we can tell, Google is calling on a handful of apps at MWC to showcase the new integration possibilities (with Google+ and other Google products) that are part of… → Read More
Jason Spero, Google’s head of mobile sales and strategy, will be taking the stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later today, where he’ll be revealing new research about smartphone growth and making some predictions about what we’ll be seeing in the mobile world over the next year.
In advance of Spero’s talk, Google is publishing a blog post that previews some of his comments. It… → Read More
There you have it folks. The Asus Padfone is about as real as a phone can be, now that Asus has formally unveiled the little beast here at Mobile World Congress.
What we’re looking at is a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED qHD display running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with a Snapdragon dual-core S4 chip from Qualcomm. You’ll find an 8-megapixel camera on the back equipped with autofocus and flash… → Read More
We’re here live with Facebook’s CTO Bret Taylor at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. First as a keynote then a one-to-one interview. Facebook has made a very good friend in mobile up to now — Taylor says it took Facebook eight years to reach 145 million people on desktop, but only four to reach 425 million on mobile. Now the big question is how much further will that go?
Today we are… → Read More
Explosive growth. That’s Android. Google’s mobile platform is up 250 percent over last year and, according to Andy Rubin, SVP, Mobile and Digital Content, Google is seeing 850,000 activations every day. In all he states there are 300 million Google-sanctioned Android devices roaming the world, 12 million of them tablets. That number doesn’t even include devices like the Kindle Fire that do not use… → Read More
musiXmatch, a large music lyrics content provider, is doubling down on mobile at Mobile World Congress. That makes sense – how often have you wondered about the lyrics to a song and ended up surfing some really bad ad-filed site? The new free Android musiXmatch Lyrics Player lets you identify the lyrics from any audio source (using Gracenote). That means to hold up the app to the music your… → Read More
I think it’s safe to say that the new 808 Pureview handset was a surprise to just about everyone here at Nokia’s press conference. Not only did Nokia manage to squeeze a 41-megapixel sensor (no, that’s not a typo) into a smartphone, they squeezed it into a smartphone that runs on the Symbian Belle OS.
But first, let’s get the nitty gritty out of the way. Ridiculous camera aside, the 808… → Read More
In Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress, Taiwanese handset maker HTC yesterday gave us a glimpse of its new, lean-and-mean smartphone strategy, HTC One — a unified set of Android devices complete with features and services that it hopes will help bring it back into the thick of things.
One thing that was very absent, though, was the M word. → Read More
And there we have it! Nokia’s Executive Vice President of Mobile Devices has just taken the stage again here at Nokia’s MWC press conference to officially unveil their new entry-level Lumia 610 smartphone. → Read More
