Mobile World Congress, the world's largest telecommunications tradeshow, is back this year in full swing. Attendance (80000 people expected) and the number of exhibitors are not yet those of 2019, the show's peak year, but they're getting there. The aisles are packed, while dark, unattended hall corners with no stands or exhibitors are a memory of a pandemic past. The biggest difference we've noticed compared with previous editions of the show is a strong shift towards B2B applications and infrastructure, with fewer and fewer consumer-focused announcements by a limited group of (mostly Chinese) brands. Nevertheless, it was still possible to find some interesting news here and there beyond the talk about 5G adoption acceleration, industrial IoT, and network infrastructures. Here's Domus' selection of six “Best in Show” news from Barcelona, joining the recent launch of the new Oppo Find N2 Flip to confirm that 'foldable' smartphones are less and less of a niche.
Foldable phones are not a niche anymore, and everything else we saw at MWC 2023
Europe's most relevant event for connected devices is back to (almost) pre-Covid levels, with lots of new announcements, including foldable phones of all forms and shapes and a Nokia smartphone that's super-easy to disassemble and repair.
Too bad that Nokia-the-phone-manufacturer was also at the show, as a brand controlled by HMD, introducing a new repairable phone. That certainly generated confusion in more than a few attendants who tried to visit the big Nokia stand to check out the cool repairable telephone and got a nice overview of (the other) Nokia's latest innovations in 5G infrastructure instead.
View Article details
- Andrea Nepori
- 01 March 2023
The biggest difference we've noticed compared with previous editions of the show is a strong shift towards B2B applications and infrastructure, with fewer and fewer consumer-focused announcements by a limited group of (mostly Chinese) brands. Nevertheless, it was still possible to find some interesting news here and there beyond the talk about 5G adoption acceleration, industrial IoT, and network infrastructures. Here's Domus' selection of six "Best in Show" news from Barcelona.
At MWC23, Lenovo showed a couple of interesting concepts built around flexible displays. One was a new laptop with a slide-up foldable screen that turns a regular 12.7", 4:3 display into a portrait 15.3" display with an 8:9 form factor. According to Lenovo, such a display form factor could be useful for working with code or splitting the screen vertically to write, surf the web, or edit video.
Xiaomi stole the limelight by introducing the Xiaomi 13 series at a show with few big launches. Xiaomi 13 Pro, the new flagship model, leverages the company's partnership with Leica as the first phone with a massive, compact-camera level 1" sensor. Xiaomi even scored a high-level endorsement by renowned photographer Steve McCurry to showcase the device's photographic capabilities.
The other big consumer announcement of the show came from Honor, which picked the first day of the show to introduce its new Honor Magic 5 series and to announce the availability of the Honor Vs foldable phone. The Magic Vs is Honor's first foldable to debut on international markets. Design-wise, it's similar to Galaxy Z Fold 4, but it sports a thinner body and has no visible gap between the two halves when folded.
After being fully acquired by Oppo, OnePlus has been struggling to keep up the brand relationship with its longtime fans. At Mobile World Congress, the brand tried to regain its cool status by introducing the first smartphone with liquid cooling. As the name suggests, the OnePlus 11 Concept is not meant to be released to the public, but it's an experiment to assess the viability of internal liquid cooling on a portable device. Despite a design that would maybe impress a few gamers here and there, it's hard to fully grasp why we should want liquid cooling on a smartphone. After all, we live in an era when performance-per-watt is the talk of the town. Even the company's official numbers show that the cooling system only has minor negligible effects on frame rate during gameplay and recharge speed.
The second Lenovo foldable screen concept was actually branded as a Motorola phone. Unlike the laptop, the screen on this new Motorola foldable phone concept rolls around the bottom edge, turning the compact smartphone into a larger device with more screen real estate.
The new Nokia G22 is a smartphone that's built to be easy to repair. HMD, the Finnish company that produces and markets Nokia phones, partnered with iFixit to develop a fully repairable design and pre-made kits for the most common repairs that are affordable and easy to use, even for non-tinkerers. Replacing the battery, on the G22, for example, is a 5 minutes job that would set you back €25 for both the spare part and the option iFixit toolkit.
The general feeling at MWC23 was that GSMA is embracing a transformation of the show back into a fully B2B fair. Apart from a few consumer-tech holdouts, the show's main themes were mainly business and infrastructure-oriented. The confusion around Nokia's rebranding is the epitome of this shift. Nokia-the-infrastructure-provider picked the show to announce a new logo and a full rebranding to make it clear that they're not Nokia-the-phone-manufacturer anymore.
Too bad that Nokia-the-phone-manufacturer was also at the show, as a brand controlled by HMD, introducing a new repairable phone. That certainly generated confusion in more than a few attendants who tried to visit the big Nokia stand to check out the cool repairable telephone and got a nice overview of (the other) Nokia's latest innovations in 5G infrastructure instead.
Nokia's old logo (above), in a comparison with the new Logo that will be used for industrial and b2b solutions.