With so many amazing announcements being made on the first day of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, 2009 looks set to be a hot year for mobile, despite the economic climate
Why is it that all the big news in Mobile has to be announced on one single day in February? Even using Charged magazine’s state-of-the-art tracking equipment (TweetGrid), it’s nearly impossible to thoroughly digest it all (I think it’s given me serious gas).
Here are some partially chewed highlights from Day 1:
Turn-by-turn just got better (stop walking into lamp posts, already!) Nokia’s got a new “GPS converged device” [via Mobile Burn]
With all the benefits of a dedicated GPS device and converged mobile device, the Nokia 6710 Navigator includes the most up-to-date developments in Nokia Maps software, with drive and walk navigation, full regional maps and a dedicated navigation key and a touch area for easy zooming.
While I never liked the first Omnia, and felt that the HTC Touch HD didn’t really live up to its name, the new Samsung Omnia HD seriously kicks open the doors to high-def [via Mobile Mentalist]
The screen itself is a 3.7″ monster, with AMOLED display technology, 16:9 ratio and a 360 x 640 pixel. It’s this that helps the OmniaHD produce such startlingly good pictures. Well, the screen and also the display chip inside it that can genuinely display HD video.
The OmniaHD will also record at 720p HD as well at 24 frames per second, making it the first mobile phone with HD video recording and playback in the world!
[Plus it's got more TouchWiz]
The next geneartion, G2, Android phone arrives, again from HTC. Introducing the HTC “Magic” [via Boy Genius Report]
An exclusive to Vodafone in Europe, the Magic is of debatable sexyness when compared to the T-Mobile G1 (and looks very Sony Ericsson, does it not?) and just happens to be one those phones that we’re just dying to know more about. But for now we can safely say that the Magic will feature HSPA, WiFi and GPS connectivity along with a 3.2 megapixel camera — sans flash — and of course come with a healthy dose of that sweet, sweet Cupcake that so many of you G1 users are clamoring for.
Every computer company is going into mobile devices–and why not? After all, they’ve effectively become tiny computers [via UMPC Portal]
With an even bigger WVGA screen than the HTC Touch Pro2 that we highlighted earlier today, the Acer M900 Tempo is going to be another high-end smartphone to consider if you need a consolidated device. Its got a similar high-capacity battery to the Pro2, GPS and a higher resolution camera. The processor is still an ARM11 device though so once again, the form factor is good but the CPU isn’t quite there. I can also hear the simultaneous cheers and boo’s for Windows Mobile!
And that’s just a small sample of all the mobile noise blasting out from Barcelona. So much is just getting lost amonst all the shouting. Mobile companies really need to start learning to stagger their announcements if they want to be heard.
While it proves difficult to know everything that is happenig, quickly scanning the reports pouring in on my TweetGrid, it looks like an exciting year in mobile. The Mobile World Congress seems to have a lot more people excited than did CES a few weeks ago.






February 17th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
I would like the Acer M900 Tempo model but only without windows and with Linux.