Highlights of Mobile World Congress 2010, or Cursorily about Mobiles in Barcelona

For four days Barcelona has become the centre of world mobile industry. Mobile World Congress 2010 was the most expected exhibition of this year. Let’s see the most interesting in world of mobiles this year. MWC is the most respected one in the world. In spite of depression, more than one thousand companies from all over the world presented their products.

One of the differences in this year became exposition App Planet. This, so-called exposition in exposition, occupied the whole exhibition hall and was dealt with mobile applications only. Here at the first day conference about the world of mobile applications took place. In conference such companies as Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia, Qualcomm, RIM and others participated. 15 well-known mobile operators came to an arrangement about the general base of applications. AT&T, Sprint, Telecom Italia, T-Mobile and others had to join about 3 billions of subscribers. Many companies rented the second stands where they presented only the applications. For example, Australian Locatrix suggested the application UandMe, the social network that allows to be in contact and to search together for place of meeting. This will be very useful for you and your child while walking, for example. System allows using the information of Facebook and Twitter jointly. Big choice of games was presented here. The Japanese besides games presented that they like to read comics through their cellphones. Comics NTT Solmare is comfortable for the ability to download them in memory and in this way to decrease the Internet traffic. It is very convenient that you can read them even in underground if you don’t have the signal.

Americans prefer more serious readings. Handmark suggests to its customers Forbes, CNS News, The Wall Street Journal on mobile devices. There was also the stand of Skype in this exhibition hall. Skype presented its product for the phones of different producers.

Microsoft became a superstar of congress with its new operating system for mobiles Windows Phone 7. You must forget about Windows Mobile. The concept of new OS is quite another. You must also forget about compatibility of old applications with Windows Phone 7. Windows Phone 7 built on the basis of so-called hubs. All functions of the same type are collected together. For example, summary information about all correspondence (IM-messages, message exchanging in Twitter or SMS) is collected in the section “Peoples”. The form of the new platform is very simple and very attractive at the same time. It should be noted the excellent design of hubs: big pictures with big inscriptions.

Gamers will be glad to know about the integration of new OS with the service Xbox live. May be Microsoft decided to make its own online-storage for games.

By and atour the interface of music player grew prettier, the program of synchronization and virtual keyboard were changed.

The other two main newsmakers at MWC 2010 became Samsung and HTC. We have already spoken about the first Badaphone developed by Samsung on its own platform Bada.

Samsung Wave S8500

HTC presented the Android-smartphone HTC Legeng with OS Android v. 2.1, processor Qualcomm MSM 7227 600 MHz, 384 Mb of online-storage, 3.2-inch AMOLED-display with resolution 320×480. Body of Legend is from the whole piece of aluminium with rubber insets.

Vodafone at MWC 2010 presented two models Vodafone 150 and Vodafone 250 that would be on sale in India, Turkey, and in eight African countries on price $15 and $20. The producer of both novelties is Chinese TCL. Vodafone 150 has monochrome display and Vodafone 250 – color display and FM-tuner. Phones support the work with SMS-messages and mobile purchasing services.

Vodafon 150

Vodafon 250

Sweden and Japanese alliance Sony Ericsson demonstrated mini versions of its product Xperia X10 mini and X10 mini pro. The program basis of both miniatures is Google’s OS 1.6. Taking into account SE’s pricing policy the price of the novelties won’t be very low. At the same time Sony Ericsson presented in Barcelona the pro-version of Sony Ericsson Vivaz that combines touch display with a full-fledged hardware-based QWERTY-keyboard. The model differs a little from “classical” Vivaz.

Finnish company Nokia was presented only with the Nokia Siemens Networks.

There was no official presentation of smartphones. But during the exhibition was shown data transmission with the speed 112 Mbps. This was made not with the LTE-Network, but with 3G network supported HSPA+.

This was the most interesting during the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, in our opinion. Let’s wait when all these will become real in our life.