Mobile World Congress 2009 round-up: Day 1

This year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is in full swing, and despite the global economic gloom, there’s plenty to get excited about, both on a hardware and a software front.

We’ve already seen a glut of new handsets announced, while Microsoft finally seems to be bringing its renewed focus on software to bear in the mobile arena. We’ll be reviewing the biggest stories from MWC in the days to come, looking at their impact on the mobile market and of course on you the consumer, but for now, here are the highlights, separated alphabetically into news by brand.

HTC

The Touch Pro2 and Touch Diamond2 took a bow on the HTC stand, spearheading the company’s business and consumer challenge for 2009. The Touch Pro2 has a 3.6in touchscreen, QWERTY keypad and claims its call quality makes it ideal for use in multi-party conference calls. The Touch Diamond2, meanwhile, takes forward HTC’s challenge to the iPhone with its Enhanced TouchFLO 3D interface on a 3.2in WVGA touchscreen, 5MP camera and improved performance and battery life. Both are expected to arrive in the summer.

LG

The big news from LG was the Arena, or KM900. It features a customisable 3D touch interface, a huge list of features that tick all the right boxes in terms of multimedia, performance and connectivity, and it looks the part too. LG was also showing off its stylish GD900, which holds the dubious honour of being the first transparent mobile phone to market. To be more specific, it’s the slide-out keypad that’s transparent, but still…

Microsoft

We were expecting details on Windows Mobile 6.5 to dominate the news from Microsoft, only now it’s Windows 6.5, with the ‘Mobile’ tag falling away. The new OS, expected in the second half of the year, features a new web browser with full HTML and Flash compatibility, and an overhauled interface reflected in three core menu screens. MS also announced Windows Marketplace, a pre-installed feature on forthcoming 6.5 handsets that work much like the Apple App Store, and My Phone Web, which allows users to synchronise the contents of their phone with the service’s online storage.

Nokia

The Finnish giant showed off the E55 and E75 smartphones. The E55 features a QWERTY keyboard, is impressively small and light and supports both N-Gage gaming and Nokia’s new Avi app store on top of a glut of business smartphone features. The flagship E75 adds a full keyboard on a device that Nokia says is “the best email device we have ever done”.

Samsung

The already impressive Omnia has been turbocharged into the OmniaHD, with the already lengthy feature list supplemented with the rather impressive ability of being able to shoot video at 720p, and then export said footage to an HDTV of your choice (made by Samsung, obviously)

Sony Ericsson

Despite recent rumblings of a potential split between Sony and Ericsson, the brand has been on the front foot at MWC, announcing a new strategy and an exciting new concept dubbed Idou, featuring a 12.1MP camera and 16:9 touchscreen that’s likely to hit the market towards the end of the year. For now the W995 will have to suffice, which ‘only’ has a 8.1MP sensor. Being a Walkman phone, music is its primary focus, with the W995 the first handset to feature the Media Go application for managing and transferring video, photos and audio.