What’s this?

Officially called GSMA Mobile World Congress, the MWC is the most important mobile communication event every year. Everyone announces its latest greatest hits here, who’s not here is inexistent. A couple of years ago the phone manufacturers have been crammed in to CeBIT as well, but MWC has been created (formerly called 3GSM) as this industry can fill up a large expo area and four people can’t see everything in four days.

Palace on top of FIRA

Previously Cannes housed the event, but it has moved to Barcelona a few years ago. The venue is called FIRA, which is not just a simple expo area, but it’s a neatly placed location in a historical location where there are lots of stands, halls and all kinds of areas.

Exposition

The couple of thousands of exhibitors had their reason to come here. The cheapest ticket price of 600 euors is a serious negative factor for ordinary people, but accredited press personnel have been granted free entry. And they really enter: last year there have been 2700 journalists at the event, I think this year we were even more. This is the best place to have a company, a product or an innovative solution announced to the general public and the exhibitors do all they can in order to achieve this: our team received hundreds of invitations to all kinds of companies, so we had to make a selection.

Media center

I think we had a better time than the IT and hardware journalists. They were off to freeze at CeBIT (even though we were there as well), but we had the nice spring in the Catalan capital, an expo that is just a couple of blocks away from the historical city center, so it was clear that we’re going. Bocha and Gubro have already been there so it has been evident that they want to come again. Szasza has been the representative of the English site, he translated everything to English as soon as we have written it. This year we had more news than ever, in four days we posted 52 articles, a separate review of Modu and this summary.

Trends

The industry needed two years to have a proper reaction to iPhone. We had to wait this much to see all important manufacturers have at least one handset that has a full touchscreen and it is usable. Previous, hastily assembled stuff just couldn’t live up to the level of usability provided by Apple’s handset, but by now they have managed to catch up.

Samsung focused on touching

We didn’t see revolutionary or groundbreaking things. But those who have a bit more insight to this industry can observe that important fine-tunings, updates and improvements are being done in the background. The most significant thing might be that the market of smartphones is increasing fast and it soon gets united with PDAs, by now it’s really hard to clearly distinguish them. The point is that the amount of mobile communications with an operating system has multiplied in a couple of years and the great thing is that we don’t only have many kinds of devices to choose from, but besides Windows, Symbian and Apple OS we have runner-up and quite powerful operating systems as well.

HTC Magic

To begin with here’s Android, developed by Google (Open Handset Alliance) that has been only a prototype last year. The HTC device, called G1 has been launched, but meanwhile Magic has also arrived for Vodafone, and many other manufacturers have exposed or announced phones based on Android, sometimes even surprising names have appeared, like Huawei or LG.

The other newcomer has been produced by the almost dead Palm. They have surprised everyone by making a device that made the whole industry take its hats off: this is Pré. The gadget has a brand new operating system, which is called WebOS, and we have seen it for ourselves that Pré is extremely well though-out, it’s very user-friendly and it’s a device that has immense possibilities. The whole team agreed that Palm has started off to a very good direction. They have created an innovative, usable, professional and stylish handset; it’s already sure that it will be a huge success.

Hirdetés

Symbian didn’t just sit and wait either, they have announced Nokia 5800 in late-2008, and now other large manufacturers have brought such products to Barcelona that are based on the same touch-controlled platform. One of these is Sony Ericsson Idou (that might just be launched once), or we can also mention Samsung Omnia HD that seems to really rock.

The big ones

The announcements of the largest manufacturers didn’t have any great surprises. Nokia continues its business series with E55 that has a really strange keypad, and with the full QWERTY E75. Besides these they have also announced two models for the 6 series, but the most hyped handset has been N86, which is the first product from the Finnish company to feature an 8 megapixel camera. Even more, it has a changeable aperture size, and a focal length of 28 mm, which is very unique in the world of mobile phones.

Nokia N86

Samsung focused on touch-control, they have announced a couple of models that have no buttons, they can be controlled exclusively by tapping the screen. The flagship handset could be Omnia HD, which – as opposed to the previous Omnia – is not based on Windows, but it has Symbian OS, just like the one that you can see on Nokia 5800. The HD label refers to the phone’s capability of recording high-res videos, but besides that the handset is great in playback as well. The Korean giant announced musical models as well, as they have brought two handsets that feature the IcePower technology from Bang&Olufsen. Besides all these they have a prototype of the first Samsung that has a built-in projector.

Sony Ericsson didn’t do very much. Although the manufacturer has a custom of having its press conference before the opening of the expo, this time they could feature only two handsets in the spotlight. The musical W995 is a kind of all-in-one device, and it seems that SE has admitted that it’s not necessarily a good thing to limit phones by the functionalities of different segments, as W995 has a high-quality camera even though this hasn’t been specific of previous Walkman handsets. The name of the other big hit is Idou, but this Symbian-based phone might be launched only in the second semester. It is not known how unique will the 12 megapixel camera be by then, for now they had something special at least.

SE Idou

LG has been preparing seriously, the main attraction at their huge stand has been KM900 Arena. This is a touch-controlled handset, but the manufacturer’s new user interface called S-Class UI seemed very impressive in terms of usability. Another promising device is the 3G-capable watch phone with a camera, just like the handset with a transparent keyboard. Besides these we have heard rumors of an Android handset as well, but we couldn’t find anything about this. Instead of this there has been a phone based on Windows Mobile, which currently isn’t nearly as fast as KM900, it has a plugin version of the S-Class UI.

The medium ones

We can’t say anymore that Motorola is a large company, and they didn’t show anything at MWC to make us think differently. They had absolutely nothing new as their stand, but at least we took a couple of previously announced handsets in our hands, like Renew, or Kravel. The situation is quite alarming, we really don’t know how will the once renown American manufacturer get over this critical period, but we can tell you that the data transfer devices (used for deploying and operating networks) have been much more emphasized at the Motorola stand.

Motorola Renew

HTC had big hits this year as well. The new generation of the Touch series seems rather promising Touch Diamond2, Touch Cruise2, and Touch Pro2 have been the most popular, while Touch Max has been silently launched and a new Android era has started with the handset called Magic, sold exclusively by Vodafone. The new TouchFLO interface for Windows Mobile devices has great changes and its speed has been convincing as well.

Touch Pro2

Palm might also be a medium-sized manufacturer, at least because its past. They had some rough times (the company has been sold and bought many times, last year everyone has expected it to disappear), but they have brought such products to the Catalan capitol that made even the rough rivals nod appreciatively, as the model called Pré is one of the most advanced devices recently. Palm didn’t try to implement Symbian or Windows Mobile, but they have created their own operating system, called webOS. The result is astonishing, it is a highly user-friendly system, based on a new philosophy, it’s very fast and it’s use is so simple that the manufacturer could even sell the phone without a user manual.

The small ones

The smaller manufacturers did quite a lot. Alcatel was an exception, the concept of the QWERTY keyboard basic phone seems to be a very strange experiment, while the touch-controlled musical phone is still just a prototype. Sagem had no big deals either, we couldn’t see anything besides a couple of concepts and products made for Vodafone.

Alcatel musical phone

Gigabyte was one the small ones to have a big hit, a Windows-based handset, which has a completely new user interface, based on Flash and it seemed to be a nice one when we tested it, not mentioning that it’s simply beautiful. Toshiba adopted a similar concept, we have expected a lot from their TG01 all-doer top handset, and it will surely be great (hope is the last to die), but currently the UI is very slow, it needs lots of tuning.

Gigabyte S1200

Modu still seems a bit like fiction, but we won’t write much about them as we already did it here. Hyundai didn’t show an impressive range of devices, the single noteworthy handset has been Dolphin, which has a unique design, but we didn’t see it turned on, although we have a suspicion that it’s based on the MTK platform, that promises no good.

Acer DX900

The marriage of Garmin and Asus resulted in Nüvifonel; the development has been initiated by Garmin, but they couldn’t finish it all by themselves. Since the appearance of Asus they have launched two versions, called G60 and M20, we’re curious whether the final product be Garmin-like. We’ve seen an interesting water-resistant PDA at i-mate, which has been displayed in an aquarium. Acer, after acquiring E-TEN, brought eight models to the expo, four of these will become reality in the near future, most of them being ones that have been started by E-TEN. We should know about the manufacturer that they have always created something unique, this time DX900 is the most noteworthy, as it has two SIM slots.

Final words

We might be a bit disappointed about the range of phones seen, but while last year the manufacturers announced bigger things, this year they have focused on fine-tuning. The new handsets of the large manufacturers all seem to be very promising, there are no experimental handsets that are set too far from reality.

Modu and Palm are different, here we have really seen some advanced, or at least unique handsets, the others are more like cautious. They have improved and tuned the good old systems and try to join one of the two large trends, these being touchscreens and the growth of the smartphone market. It is characteristic that the largest company, Nokia, has also announced only Symbian handsets.

Hmm...

We were quite content. This year we had a larger team, more professional devices and a preset schedule. This has been seen on the coverage, we’ve posted 54 news articles, we made lots of videos, so as a closing word, let’s see one of them.

Congress summary:

We’ll of course be back next year!

Barcelona, MWC

Specifications

Mobile World Congress 2009, Barcelona
	General
	Technology	GSM, UMTS, HSDPA, LTE, WiMAX, EV-DO
	Size	8 halls
	Available colors	all from the rainbow
	Display
	Display diagonal	from zero to infinity
	Display resolution	cannot define in pixels
	Display type	TFT, plasma, OLED
	Number of colors	16.7 million
	Memory
	Internal memory	unlimited
	Memory expandability	3000 journalists
	Data transfer
	Frequency bands	850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 / 2100 / 2400 MHz
	WiFi	kubipress, with press account
	USB	10 USB drives per capita
	Push-to-talk	we’ve been talking, that’s sure
	Basic functions
	Profiles	Just simply pros!
	Vibra function	Gubro and Szasza were snoring
	Built-in handsfree	see above
	Alarm clock	yes, but we didn’t wake up
	Predictive text entry	Polacheck and Viktor0610 from home
	Software
	Platform	Human brain
	WAP / HTML browser	four notebooks
	Games	Boxhead2, Crystal Defender, Puzzlefarter
	Currency converter	Euro-forint
	Extra software	KAS
	Multimedia
	Main camera	14 megapixel Samsung, with 12mm lens
	Secondary camera	6 megapixel Pentax
	Video recording	FullHD Samsung video camera
	Music player	we had an iPod as well
	Equalizer	with ear-plug (3M)
	FM-radio	we didn’t listen to that
	Battery
	Main battery	4 people
	Standby time	4 days
	Talk time	almost 4 days
	Other
	drunk woman from New-Zealand