The new ZTE Era is a quad-core smartphone running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. It is powered by an NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor and measures a mere 7.8mm thick. ZTE plans to launch the Era in Europe and China later this year.

ZTE announced its second Windows Phone device at Mobile World Congress 2012, the Orbit. The Orbit is a lower end model that features the latest version of Windows Phone 7.5 with support for lower spec processors and 256MB of RAM. The Orbit's 1GHz processor and less RAM did make a noticeable difference to us when using the device, though ZTE says that the software is not yet finalized. Also interesting to note with the Orbit is that ZTE claims it has support for NFC, which would make it the first Windows Phone smartphone we have seen with this feature.

The ASUS Transformer Pad 300 is the new low-end of the Transfomer line of convertible Android tablets. The 300 drops the metal construction and LED flash found on the Transformer Prime, but it has many of the other features that make the Prime so special. The tablet portion has a 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display and an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor, and the keyboard dock has a full QWERTY layout and trackpad. The whole rig runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and will be released later this year.

ASUS finally settled on a design for its unique Padfone combination smartphone and tablet device, and it was showing off the goods at Mobile World Congress last week.

Along with the original ELUGA, Panasonic also announced the ELUGA Power at Mobile World Congress 2012. The ELUGA Power has a larger, 5-inch display, and runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich instead of Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

There were two big features that many device manufacturers were pushing hard this year at Mobile World Congress: quad-core processors and 4G LTE connectivity. However, we never saw those two features together on the same device. The reason this is the case, it seems, appears to have to do with chip maker Qualcomm.

Samsung has just confirmed to us that it has sold over 2 million of its 5.3-inch touchscreen equipped Galaxy Note smartphones, each of which ships with a special S Pen stylus for drawing and making notes.

Panasonic was happy to show off its new line of ELUGA smartphones for markets outside of Japan at Mobile World Congress this year. We swung by its booth to check out the ELUGA, the smaller of the two devices announced.

This week, Panasonic announced the ELUGA Power smartphone, the second in its ELUGA family and also its second smartphone for markets outside of its homeland of Japan. The ELUGA Power is larger than its smaller sibling, and runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich instead of 2.3 Gingerbread.

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Huawei announced that it will manufacture mobile devices using Intel's Tizen operating system. Tizen is an open source Linux based mobile OS that has its roots in the MeeGo, Maemo, and Moblin platforms. Huawei joins other Tizen board members Samsung, Panasonic, Intel, Casio, NEC, NTT Docomo, Orange, SK Telecom, Telefonica, and Vodafone. The Tizen association also announced that the availability of its beta open source release and a Windows version of programming tools to develop Tizen apps.