Mobile World Congress

Established vendors such as HTC, Sony, and LG Electronics want to set their smartphones apart from less expensive devices from ZTE and Huawei. But as looks and hardware specifications are becoming more similar and software differentiation harder, having a better reputation is their last ace, according to analysts.

Mobile World Congress 2012, which ended Thursday, lacked really big announcements, but offered a plethora of new smartphones in all price ranges. Before the show, Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight, said HTC and LG Electronics needed to do a major refresh of their respective portfolio of smartphones, and that they did. (See also "Hands on with the Top Phones and Tablets of MWC.")

Amid the introduction of so many tablets recently, one thing has been clear: There's room for a viable competitor to Apple. Android tablets are still not crashing Apple's iPad party, as evidenced by Apple's runaway sales.

Samsung is one of the top sellers of Android tablets so far, yet even so, an executive at Mobile World Congress admitted the company hadn't been very successful. But where Android tablets have struggled to gain traction, Windows 8 tablets are generating a lot of interest among manufacturers, consumers, and business users alike.

The Mobile World Congress provided a chance to see Acer’s CloudMobile phone up close and personal, and the limited glimpse I got of the device left me impressed.

We learned about the CloudMobile phone a few weeks ago when it won the iF design award 2012. I’m a sucker for stylish product design and appreciate when phone manufacturers put as much though into the a phone’s aesthetics in addition to its specs and features. Acer didn’t have an official booth, but I managed to track down a CloudMobile demo unit tucked away in the corner of Google’s Android Pavilion at the show.

Intel showed off a pre-production version of Lenovo’s K2 tablet at the Mobile World Congress and offered some hands-on time with the device, which had a Medfield processor inside.

The K2 will ship with Intel’s Medfield Atom processor, which is intended for both phones and tablets. Lenovo's specs call for the K2 to ship (in China first) with an Atom Z2460. Medfield, along with Clover Trail, will be Intel's answer to ARM-based processors on tablets. The demo of Android 4.0 on the Lenovo appears to set the stage for what's looks to be an interesting competition among chipmakers for a niche in the increasingly competitive tablet space.

Take a look at the demo of Mozilla's Boot-to-Gecko (B2G) mobile Web project shown this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom plan to build phones based on the B2G platform--where all of phone's apps run on the Web--including phone dialer, camera, and browser (within a browser).

For more blogs, stories, photos, and video from the world's largest mobile show, check out PCWorld's complete coverage of Mobile World Congress 2012.

Host Nick Barber gives you a tour of Google's elaborate Android booth with its smoothie bar, slides for adults, and an Android robot making bejeweled smartphone cases.

For more blogs, stories, photos, and video from the world's largest mobile show, check out PCWorld's complete coverage of Mobile World Congress 2012.

Microsoft Launches Windows 8 Consumer Preview at Mobile World CongressMicrosoft used the backdrop of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Wednesday to launch its long-awaited Windows 8 Consumer Preview. In doing so, Microsoft makes a big statement about where it sees Windows' future role on mobile devices--tablets and laptops, but no mention of phones, yet.

The Consumer Preview went live during the event, and Microsoft said that in the first hour, it had already had downloads from over 70 different countries. The company revealed little news; it's still too early to have details about availability, pricing, and distribution for Microsoft's radically new OS. But we did get a look at the Microsoft Windows Store--now live--and more insight on how Windows on ARM will work.

Anyone can take Windows 8 for a spin now that Microsoft has launched the so-called "consumer preview" version of the software at an event in Barcelona on Wednesday.

You might not be familiar with Fujitsu as a smartphone maker if you live in the United States or Europe, but the Japanese company is making some ambitious strides with its smartphone and tablet lineup for its home country. Fujitsu is showing off one of four Tegra 3 quad-core phones here at Mobile World Congress alongside its portfolio of water-proof tablets and phones.

The LTE-capable Fujitsu "ultra-high spec smartphone" (that is how the company is referring to it in press materials) has a 4.6-inch bright display, a 13.1-megapixel camera, a fingerprint sensor, and runs the latest version of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).