Mobile World Congress: What to Expect

Posted by Sam Churchill on February 17th, 2014

Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest mobile show, starts on the 24th (, exhibitors and Mobile World Daily).

A plethora of smartphone, tablet, wearable, and infrastructure announcements are expected and reported on (twitter, facebook, YouTube, IOS App and Android App).

Smartphone and tablet announcements

Samsung: At CES Samsung announced two tablets: the Galaxy TabPro and the Galaxy NotePro. A big Samsung event on February 24, is rumored to announce the new flagship S-5 smartphone. It is expected to feature a fingerprint reader on the home button. Phones based on Tizen, an alternative operating system to Android, are also rumored.
LG: LG has announced three new smartphones called the L90, L70 and L40 which will become the L Series III from LG. It follows up the L Series and L Series II. The flagship G3, a G Pro 2 phablet, and a watch are also rumored. The G3 may have a 2.2GHz octa-core run Android 4.4 KitKat, 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution, and feature a fingerprint scanner. The LG G2 Pro will feature a 13MP camera with improved optical image stabilization (OIS+) and 4K (3840 x 2160 pixels) video recording.
HTC The 5.5-inch HTC Desire 8 will be formally unveiled next week while the flagship HTC One 2 is expected to have its own dedicated launch event in March. HTC could also announce a line of mid-range devices.
Huawei a new smartphone, two new tablets, and most interestingly, a smartwatch are expected from the manufacturer. Specs, or other details are still few.
Motorola No new hardware, but there could be some details about how the Lenovo purchase of Motorola will work and what it means for the future of the company.
Nokia: The Lumia 930 would be the successor to the Nokia Lumia 920 and would launch with a quad-core 2.2GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. Nokia’s event could include an 8-inch tablet – possibly the Lumia 2020, but the really interesting rumors are of an Android smartphone.
Sony: According to rumors, there will be a new flagship phone – the 5.2-inch Sirius or Xperia Z2 at MWC, and possibly a Sony Castor tablet to update the Xperia Tablet Z.
ZTE: The Chinese gian showed off the Grand S2, a couple of Nubia phones, and the Sonata 4G at CES. Announcements at MWC could add Tizen phones and smartwatches to the lineup. The ZTE Geek is the first ZTE smartphone to sport an Intel processor (the new 32nm Atom Z2580).

Infrastructure announcements

Alcatel-Lucent: Small Cells, WiFi 2.0 Integration, LTE-Advanced and new LTE wins are expected. Alcatel-Lucent will showcase a new Distributed Antenna System. The U.S. and China are the world’s largest DAS markets and are expected to remain so through at least 2017.
Ericsson: The largest cellular infrastructure company will likely have announcements across the board, including their new 4G-compatible cloud-based push-to-talk (PTT) service in Europe.
NSN: Announcements on 5G, Mobile Broadband/LTE, Big data, OTT, telco cloud and outsourcing are promised.
Huawei: Huawei is promoting its FusionSphere — an open cloud platform optimized for convergence. Huawei’s Cloud DC solution flattens architecture to facilitate global management & resource scheduling.

China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, received TD-LTE licenses in December last year and can now offer TD-LTE in mainland China.