The best, smartest and worst of MWC

As Mobile World Congress slowly ground to a halt on Friday, we feel it would be a good idea to go over what the team liked and disliked about the tech on show this year.  Companies such as Nvidia have been frantically talking up Quad Core CPUs, Asus have been going crazy with form factors such as the PadFone and HTC has just been trying to regain ground they lost last year.

So, without further ado, I present the categories:

• Favourite thing shown that you would buy
  
• Favourite niche technology (cool but you likely wouldn’t get one)
  
• Biggest sigh of the show

Indeed, as most of the announcements came by Tuesday, we’ve all had a fair amount of time to think about this.web

Favourite thing that you would buy

It seems the most popular choice here is the Asus Padfone. Mark Dearlove, Paul and I would happily get one of these clever devices. For those of you who don’t know, the Padfone is a 4.3inch phone that docks into a 10.1 inch tablet. All the brains live in phone and the tablet just serves as a bigger battery and screen.

One thing we’ve seen a lot of with this MWC is a general malaise towards the spec race. Mark, Paul and Karucifer all agree that everything getting more powerful or getting bigger and better screens is getting boring now. There’s very little innovation, but we all agree that the Padfone stands out amongst the crowd. Paul has the following to say for the Padfone and the concept in general:

Quote

The consensus between most of us here is that the Padfone is the best vision of the future that we have seen thus far. If Microsoft can squeeze the famously bloated Windows onto hardware that can live inside a phone then we have most definitely reached a level where hardware power is not a big problem. Manufacturers simply have to worry about producing designs that take what we have in interesting new directions. Then we can take into account what Ubuntu have recently announced – a solution very similar to Motorola’s webtop, but running a real full operating system. We hear a lot of complaints about the tablet interface in Android not being up to scratch, but what if a tablet (or a Padfone) docked into a keyboard dock just became a regular, linux running computer. In one device, you’d have a phone, a tablet and a PC. Surely this is the direction technology is taking us right now.

Aside from that, there is still some love for the crazy high-end. Both Novek and I agree that the Huawei Ascend D Quad was really cool. It was pretty amazing to see the relatively unknown company pull out a high end handset with Stock Android 4.0, but it was even more amazing to see that they had created their own Quad Core CPU and announced a model with a huge battery, too. Even if some of us want to see more imagination in designs, I must admit I’m just wowed by the device. The community we have here is already partial to a few Huawei devices and I’d love to see this one gathering attention from tinkerers.

Sadly, the huge battery that was in the D Quad XL was a bit of a one off. I almost expected to see some breakthroughs in battery size in a similar vein to the XL or Motorola Razr Maxx. Sadly all we got was non-removable (!) batteries that still weigh in below the 2000mAh mark.

Cool, niche stuff you probably wouldn’t buy
We’ve got almost complete agreement here on the Nokia Pureview 808. It may not be Android, it may not even be Windows Phone, but a 41mp camera is technology not to be sniffed at. Let’s hope this rather startling camera technology finds its way into handsets we actually care about. Of course, not everyone on the team thinks the same way -Karucifer mentions that he’d be happy to get such a device. As the image processor chip that makes the whole thing possible is made by Broadcom and designed with Android in mind, we may well see it in products soon.

Least favourite thing/ biggest sigh
We’ve go into this a bit already above, but the lack of originality is the main issue for most of the team. However, the one device that everyone has complained about this year has been the LG Optimus Vu. I would like to extend my disappointment to the whole LG range, however. The general understanding of the Vu has been “why?” from all of us here. It’s a 5 inch tablet thing that apes the Galaxy Note but manages to fail in terms of specs, software and design (it’s apparently far too wide to hold). It also launches on Android 2.3, so is out of date by default. My chagrin with LG continues into their full range of devices announced at MWC. I’m already quite vocal about the company and I wrote something about them just before MWC started. Suffice to say, they really didn’t impress with their showing last week.

Firstly, the software was bad. I can’t complain too much about some of the devices getting ICS, but the ones that have it are bogged down in LG’s really ugly skin. It’s like they were given ICS’s design book, Touchwiz’s design files and then promptly blinded before being asked to design the skin. Of course, only the Optimus 4x, the L7 and L5 are even running ICS. The other four devices they announced were all on Gingerbread.

Like a lot of other hardware at the show, LG’s was completely uninteresting, or downright pitiful (The L5 had a HVGA screen at 4 inches. WHAT!?). The Optimus 4x carried a quad core Tegra 3, much like the equally uninspiring HTC One X (most of the team found it uninspiring, except Paul. As he’s actually had a chance to use one, perhaps it is good). The sentiment on boring hardware is what we mentioned before. Everyone was just rushing to be fastest this, or thinnest that.

I know I’ve singled LG out, but they’re just the biggest offender. The biggest thing we’ve taken away from MWC is that we want more Padfones, or, more companies to take risks like Asus have been taking recently.