MWC's Best Mobiles [MWC 2011]

This year's Mobile World Congress didn't bring any surprising innovations but rather even more of the touchscreen Android hype. Almost every manufacturer showed a smartphone with some version of Android in it and tablets were hardly an exception. Phones are still the most common pocketable gadgets, but with so many similar handsets out there you might be wondering which one you should choose. Well, we hand-picked the finest phones of the congress, so you don't get lost in the countless announcements!

1. Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo

2. Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro

3. ZTE Amigo

4. Samsung Galaxy S2

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NVIDIA unveils the world’s first quad-core mobile processor [MWC 2011]

Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, NVIDIA announced, and then showed working models of its quad-core processor which shows a 3x improvement over the current dual-core chip. And according to NVIDIA's roadmap, this is just the beginning.

The simply ridiculously powerful quad-core CPU, which is being called “Project Kal-El”. Project Kal-El, the newest member of the Tegra family, uses a new 12 core GeForce GPU, and it rusn 1440p video on an extreme HD display of 2560×1600.

NVIDIA’s newest Tegra chip is due to hit the manufacturer in August. Tablets will be the first device to feature the new chip, and smartphones will have them by Christmas of this year. That is not just a technological improvement, it is a technological leap.

NVIDIA claims that the newest chip in the Tegra family will show a 5x improvement over the current Tegra 2 chip, and that is just the beginning. In 2012, “Project Wayne” will debut with 10x improvement over the Tegra 2 chip. 2013 will see the release of “Project Logan”, and 2014 will see the debut of “Project Stark”, which is promised to show a staggering 75x improvement.

To put this simply, smartphones may soon become totally obsolete as the second, third, and even fourth generation of superphones are already on the horizon.

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SmartDevices SmartQ Ten Android Tablet [MWC 2011]

SmartDevices has showed off their newest Android tablet at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Known as the SmartQ Ten, the device is packed with a 9.7-inch 1024 x 768 touchscreen IPS display, a 720MHz ARM Cortex A9 processor, a Mali 400 graphics card, a 512MB RAM, an 8GB of flash storage, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth and runs on Android 2.2 OS. Unfortunately, there’s no word on pricing and release date yet.

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iPhone 4 Catches The Best Phone Award at MWC [MWC 2011]

The Mobile World Congress is the biggest mobile expo of the year, but it's not only about the new technology being announced - MWC also hosts the Global Mobile Awards, which give credit to the best mobile devices, companies and software. And this year's awards have been exciting as always, but the winner in the Best Mobile Device category goes to iPhone 4.

When it comes to mobile manufacturer, HTC dominated the scene and grabbed the "Device Manufacturer of the Year" award.

Check out all the winners below:

1. Global Mobile App Awards
- App of the Year on the Apple Platform
Rovio / Clickgamer/Chillingo for Angry Birds
- App of the Year on the BlackBerry App World Platform
Research In Motion for BlackBerry Messenger
- App of the Year on the Android Platform
Google for Google Maps
- App of the Year on the Nokia Platform
Herocraft & InnerActive for Zum Zum
- Best Mobile App
Rovio / Clickgamer/Chillingo for Angry Birds


2. Mobile Advertising & Marketing
- Best Mobile Advertising & Marketing Campaign
Mobilera - Outeractive for Unilever Cornetto Multiplayer Interactive Wall  Projection Mapping Game
 

3. Best Mobile Business & Enterprise
- Best Mobile Enterprise Product or Solution
Antenna for Antenna Mobility Platform (AMP)
- Best Mobile Money Product or Solution
Airtel Africa, MasterCard Worldwide and Standard Chartered Bank for Airtel Card
 

4. Social & Economic Development
- Best use of Mobile for Social & Economic Development
Ericsson and Flexenclosure for Ericsson Community Power
- Best Mobile Money for the Unbanked Service
Vodafone Group, Safaricom, Vodacom, Vodafone Essar Limited and Roshan Ltd for M-PESA
Best Product, Initiative or Service for Underserved Segment
BBC World Service Trust for BBC Janala
 

5. Mobile Innovation
- Best M-Health Innovation
Mobisante Inc for MobiUS
- Best Mobile Learning Innovation
Urban Planet Mobile and PT Telkomsel for Urban English, Mobile English Learning Initiative
- Best Mobile Innovation for Utilities
EDMI and Sierra Wireless for EDMI EWM100 Advanced GSM/GPRS Modem for Smart Metering Applications
- Best Mobile Innovation for Automotive & Transport
Nissan Motor, AT&T, NTT DOCOMO, and Telenor Connexion for ICT for Electric Vehicles
- Best Embedded Mobile Device (Non-Handsets)
AT&T and VITALITY, Inc for AT&T-connected Vitality GlowCaps
 

6. Green Mobile Award
- Green Mobile Award for Best Green Product/Service or Performance
Bharti Infratel for GreenTowers P7 Project
 

7. Best Mobile Devices
- Best Mobile Device
Apple for iPhone 4
- Device Manufacturer of the Year
HTC
 

8. Best Technology
- Best Mobile Broadband Technology
Ruckus Wireless for Ruckus Mobile Wi-Fi Gateway System
- Best Mobile Technology for Emerging Markets
Orange for Orange solar base station programme
- Best Technology Breakthrough
Seven Networks for SEVEN Open Channel
- Best Customer Care & CRM
Airtel Africa and Tango Telecom for Tango Telecom’s ‘Dynamic Pricing Service’
 

9. Outstanding Achievement Awards
- GSMA Chairman's Award
Dr. Wang Jianzhou, Chairman, China Mobile
- Government Leadership Award
Government of Afghanistan

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HTC ChaCha and Salsa Hands-on [Video][MWC 2011]

Source: Youtube

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amsung Galaxy S 2 Hands-On [MWC 2011]

Sleek, thin and light this is what the Galaxy S 2 is all about! Coming with a stunning 4.27” WVGA Super AMOLED Plus screen that is both bright and offers vivid colors. Running Android 2.3 and a 1GHz Dual Core CPU, the Galaxy S 2 is just impressively fast and makes using Sasmung’s TouchWiz 4.0 UI a bliss. The Galaxy S 2 also comes with a 8Mpix Camera that will be capable to shoot 1080p video for your, and even if we could not check the result of our test, what we seen on the screen was very promising.
So here as well as fantastic phone made another Korea manufacturer, if things goes like this it will become almost impossible to choose between them all!

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Amigo, another Android Phone by ZTE [MWC 2011]

Along with the high-end (for its Android lineup) ZTE Skate, the manufacturer lifted the curtain from a smaller creation, the ZTE Amigo.The ZTE Amigo main selling point is the presence of a physical slide-out QWERTY keyboard with four rows of keys. It sports a 3.5" display, and is powered by an unspecified chipset, probably nothing very fast, considering that even the ZTE Skate got an 800MHz Qualcomm silicon. On the rear you can find a 3MP camera without a flash.

Android phones with QWERTY keyboards are few and far between, so any entrance in that category helps. Knowing ZTE, which, it recently turned out, is the 5th largest cell phone manufacturer in the world, its Android creations won't break the bank.

  The ZTE Amigo will be out some time in May in the UK, but no information on Pricing yet.

Via: Phonescoop

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LG’s Glasses-Free 3-D Phone [MWC 2011]

Unlike its underwhelming Optimus Pad tablet, LG’s Optimus 3D cellphone is rather impressive. Its 4.3-inch screen is capable of displaying 3-D without the need for a pair of 3D glasses.

The Optimus runs Android 2.2 (which is user-upgradeable to 2.3), and the screen runs at 480 x 800 resolution. This is, according to the rather hopeful person who wrote the spec-card that accompanies the phone, enough for 1080p video. To be fair, this more likely refers to the HDMI-out capability, which will deliver 3-D video at 720p and regular 2-D at 1080p.
3-D images can be captured via the pair of cameras on the back, just like the Optimus Pad, but you can also view it right there on the phone. The display works a lot like the Nintendo 3DS, using lens-based trickery to send different images to each eye. The effect is surprisingly convincing, although it oddly seems to make the screen seem smaller. While I can become engrossed in a movie on an tablet set a few feet in front of me, to the extent that I forget I’m looking at such a small screen, the 3-D display is looked at, rather than looked into. Still, the 3-D-ness is convincing, and it will surely be great for gaming.
When looking at the screen from anywhere but close up, it looks like one of those novelty lenticular postcards from a museum gift-shop. This worried me for a moment, but it only happens in 3-D mode. When you return to normal phone use, the screen looks no different from any other.

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NETGEAR announces 4 new 3G/4G mobile broadband routers [MWC 2011]

NETGEAR announced four new 3G/4G mobile broadband routers today at the 2011 Mobile World Congress. All four of the new devices will make use of Europe's 3G (HSPA+) and 4G (LTE) networks, offering both wired Ethernet ports and Wi-Fi.

"With this round of high performance mobile plus wired dual WAN routers, NETGEAR moves into new business applications, and brings high quality features from our core expertise in wired broadband gateways to mobile network operators," said Michael Clegg of NETGEAR's Service Provider Business Unit.

The new devices are as follows:

MBR1200: Quadband 3G HSPA+ (21Mbps x 5.76Mbps) with HSPA fallback and failover to wired FE WAN
MBR1310: Quadband 3G DC-HSPA+ (42Mbps x 5.7Mbps) with HSPA+/HSPA fallback and failover to wired FE WAN
MBR1517: Euro LTE (100Mbps x 50Mbps) with HSPA+/HSPA fallback and failover to wired FE WAN
MBR2000: Quadband 3G DC-HSPA+ (42Mbps x 5.7Mbps) with HSPA+/HSPA fallback and failover to ADSL2+
NETGEAR cites the incredible potential, not only for customers, but for mobile operators as well. If such high-performance networking options are available, more commercial customers might add mobile broadband to their business arsenal.

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HTC Flyer is ready to take off in Q2 2011 [MWC 2011]

HTC's first tablet - the HTC Flyer, which was leaked quite heavily in the recent weeks. Anyway, this aluminum tablet is now 100% official, so let's delve deeper and explore what it has to offer!Starting with its most important asset, the HTC Flyer will have a compact 7-inch touchscreen with 600x1024 pixels res, which will come with an integratedpressure-sensitive pen experience, courtesy of the new HTC Scribe technology. This makes the Flyer the first tablet with built in compatibility for work with a pen. The feature will be used for note-taking and drawing.

The tablet will be constructed out of HTC trademark aluminum unibody, which, although giving it a sense of classiness and durability, might make it a bit weighty. We'll check that once we get to the device for a hands-on treatment! The HTC Flyer will be powered by a single-core 1.5GHz (wohoo!) processor, and will feature 1GB RAM, coupled with 32GB of built-in storage (microSD slot is available). For photo and video taking, HTC's first foray into the tablet biz will offer a 5MP main shooter, as well as a secondary 1.3MP front-facing cam for video chats. Powering all this goodness will be courtesy of a 4000mAh battery that is said to provide up to 4 hours of constant video playback.

Software-wise, the HTC Flyer will run on Android. Surprised? Not really. However, it might be interesting to know that it actually won't take advantage of Google's Honeycomb OS, but will rather stick with the 2.4 Gingerbread experience. While that may sound like a bit of a setback, it seems Peter Chou and company are pretty confident in their upcoming creation, as they have specifically tailored a version of their Sense UIthat will work just fine with the HTC Flyer's large 7" screen. In addition to the HTC Scribe software that we mentioned already, the manufacturer has prepared two more exclusive treats for its tablet, namely the OnLive cloud gaming service and HTC Watch app that will be used for movie streaming and downloading.

The HTC Flyer will hit shelves globally starting Q2 2011. Well, we were actually hoping for something a bit more accurate, but we'll obviously have to wait some more before we are hit with a concrete release date.

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Acer unveils ICONIA SMART [MWC 2011]

It's time to welcome the Acer ICONIA SMART, the first 4.8-inch tablet/smartphone.
If we put the sheer size of its screen aside, the Acer ICONIA SMART will also offer a 21:9 aspect ratio and an impressive resolution of 480 x 1024. The rest of its specs are not to be underestimated either - it packs a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 2 cameras (the rear one offers 8MP and LED flash, while the front facer is 2MP), Android 2.3 and all the connectivity options we have come to expect from modern smartphones - like Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth plus DLNA.

No words on pricing of this yet, but we know its UK release date is May 1.

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Adobe Flash Player 10.2 showcased at MWC [MWC 2011]

Adobe Systems announced that Flash Player and AIR adoption exceeded expectations as it took only six months to reach 20 million smartphones with Adobe Flash Player 10.1. And the number for 2011 is expected to reach 132 million supported units across the globe. Applications using Adobe's Integrated Runtime, also known as Adobe AIR, could be distributed to 84 million smartphone and tablets running Android and iOS. Devices supporting Adobe AIR are to surge to 200 million by the end of the year.

Even more exciting is the opportunity to look at the latest Adobe Flash Player 10.2, showcased at MWC. The new version will support features like Stage Video, which boosts video performance through optimization of hardware acceleration, while lowering processor and memory usage. It will be supported on Android 3.0 Honeycomb and BlackBerry Tablet OS. But the boost affects mobile as well – H.264 online video will benefit from Stage Video. Expectations for the new Flash Player were for it to perform up to 10 times faster.

Via: Adobe

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ZTE unveiled its new ZTE SKATE at MWC [MWC 2011]

Today a Chinese company ZTE unveiled its new flagship model at MWC - this mobile phone, known as the ZTE Skate, will be launched in May Worldwide. The SKATE will pack a 4.3-inch screen, a 5MP camera and an 800MHz processor with an Adreno 200 graphics processing unit.
Gingerbread will power the ZTE Skate experience, and all the usual goodies like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS will be present as well.

No word on pricing yet.

Via: ZTE

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Sierra Wireless AirCard 753S and 754S announced [MWC 2011]

Sierra Wireless has announced a pair of new WiFi hotspots at MWC 2011 in Barcelona. The two new hotspots are the AirCard 753S and the 754S. Both of the devices are about the size of a deck of cards and are made to be lightweight for portability. The hotspots are easy to use and allow the user to connect in under a minute.
Both have LCD screens on them to provide a look at battery life, network strength, and the device connected. They have audible alerts for status of the device and more.
The difference between the two devices is that the 754S supports 4G LTE networks and the 753s is a 3G only device.
The 753S is good for up to 42Mbps download and 5.76Mbps upload on DC-HSPA+ networks.
The 754S is good for up to 100Mbps download and up to 50Mbps upload on LTE networks and will operate on 3G networks as well.
No word on Pricing yet.

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LG in Partnership with Youtube 3D [MWC 2011]

LG announced their new Optimus 3D Smart Phone at their press conference this morning here at Mobile World Congress[MWC] 2011. This device’s claim to fame is that it can capture and play back 3D content without the need of 3D glasses. They also announced a partnership with YouTube’s 3D channel for easy upload and sharing of captured 3D content from the Optimus 3D directly to YouTube’s dedicated 3D channel.

LG stated that 3D was one of the trends for mobile devices in 2011 that they want to take a lead with, which is why they created a phone with 3D as its core differentiator.

In a joint statement from LG and YouTube the companies stated:

“The new partnership is part of a broader push into 3D entertainment by LG and the world’s largest online video community,” the companies said in a joint statement. “YouTube and LG collaborated to enable the delivery and sharing of 3D video onto mobile devices in a way that makes it simple and easy for consumers.”

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Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro [MWC 2011]

Just after SE Introduced the Xperia Neo, the company unveiled another Android 2.3 Phone, the Xperia Pro. Both the Xperia Neo and Pro comes with the same basic specs and features on the paper with however the addition of a full qwerty keyboard on the Xperia Pro. The Xperia Pro is just a Neo with a slide-out keyabord!

Full Specifications of SE Xperia Pro

Via: Sony Ericsson

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Sony Ericsson introduces the Xperia Neo, an 8MP Gingerbread Smartphone [MWC 2011]

Xperia NEO, a new Android Gingerbread (2.3) Smartphone introduced by SE.
The Neo comes with a 3.7” FWVGA screen (854×480), a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU,8MP back camera and a 2MP Front camera and HDMI out.

Xperia Neo full Specifications

Via: Sony Ericsson

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Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab 2 at MWC [MWC 2011]

Samsung just released, without saying much, a few shot of its new Galaxy Pad II! Powered by Android 3.0, the Galaxy Pad is rumored to comes with a 1GHz CPU, a 10.1″ screen with a 1280×800 resolution, a 8Mpix Camera with HD Video recoding capabilities, and that’s pretty much all we know for now…

Via: Samsung

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Samsung unveils its new Galaxy S 2 ahead of MWC![MWC 2011]

The i9100 or Galaxy S 2! Like LG, Samsung could not resist to unveil its latest smartphone ahead of MWC! The Galaxy S 2 or i9100 comes with a 1.2GHz Dual Core Snapdragon CPU (Qualcomm 8260), a 4.27” WVGA super AMOLED plus screen, a 8Mpix Camera with AF and Touch Focus on the back and a 2Mpix one on the front, 512MB of RAM and 16GB of Internal Memory, AGPS, Digital Compact, Gyrometer, Accelerometer, Proximity Senor and Light Sensor.
The Galaxy S 2 comes with Full HD video recoding at 30fps as well as Video Zoom and support MP4, 3GP, DivX, XviD and Streaming video.

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ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro 10" dual-boot tablet coming at MWC

ViewSonic has announced that it'll be displaying a new tablet during Mobile World Congress. Interesting thing about the ViewPad 10Pro is that it dual-boots into Windows and Android operating system, making it a perfect device for work as well as play.
Just boot Windows when you want to work and boot Android when you want to play around.
The tablet is based on Intel's Oak Trail platform and features a 10.1-inch LED-backlit multi-touch display (1024 x 600), WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth ,and 6 hours of battery life.
Sounds good, but ViewSonic shied away from mentioning its price so hope its price-tag doesn't play a spoilsport.
More information will be revealed during MWC, so stay tuned!

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