Highlights of the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

Sony Ericsson Idou

Nokia N86 8MP

HTC Touch Pro2

Mobile World Congress 2009 is over, we're all back in our normal parts of the world, recovering, and overall we're pleased with how the show went. Sure, it was an awful lot of work that resulted in much less sleep than we might have hoped for, but we got to see some cool new devices and services that made it all worth the effort.

This is in stark contrast to CES, which was basically the Palm Pre show. Not that the Pre isn't a fine device, because it seems to be quite solid from what we can tell, but you know that there is something wrong with the industry when the Consumer Electronics Show is actually quiet, and you have free time on your hands.

At least Mobile World Congress felt real. Maybe a little less hectic than in previous years, but not much so. There were some surprises, too, which is always fun. In an age where most devices are already old news by the time they are formally announced, it was nice to see the Sony Ericsson Idou catch everybody off guard.

We certainly knew that Sony Ericsson was working on an S60^(INFO) based device, putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to the Symbian Foundation^(INFO), but with a near total lack of buzz before hand, not to mention the fact that not a single "spy shot" came across my desk in the preceding weeks, we weren't expecting it.

And that is, honestly, how it should be.

So if Sony Ericsson pleasantly surprised us, what did we feel let us down? In a word: Android. In spite of the industry's cries of "delay" regarding Samsung's Android plans, we knew that the company never said anything about showing an Android^(INFO) device at MWC. Just because people post rumors about something doesn't make it true, you know. So while we don't blame Samsung at all, HTC really had us scared when it failed to launch the follow-up to the G1 at its press conference, showing instead only the new Touch Diamond2 and Touch Pro2. Peter Chou and company came through later in the week, though, when the HTC Magic was launched at Vodafone's press conference.

Huawei, however, failed to live up to its promise of showing an Android powered device at the show. It did seem to have some non-working mockups or prototypes that it was showing in private, but there certainly was nothing on the show floor, which was a huge disappointment. General Mobile came through, and Texas Instruments was showing a cool developer device, but that was really it apart from some apps. Considering that many journalists expected MWC09 to be the Android show, we were a bit disappointed.

 

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