Mobile World Congress Impressions

It would be an understatement to say that the 2009 Mobile World Congress (which kicked off in Barcelona on Monday) has been the most eagerly anticipated outing yet. Some of the expected highlights included the announcement Windows Mobile 6.5, a slew of phones based on Google’s Android and a GSM version of the Palm Pre with Vodaphone, though nothing official on that one yet.

Heck, if you want to get your Dick Tracy stylez on, LG has busted out their LG910 touch screen watch phone…

Day one seemed to be dedicated mostly to Windows Mobile phones (soon to be known as Windows Phones?), with the Redmond company announcing the updated Windows Mobile 6.5 phone OS, as well as a slew of services including Marketplace for Mobiles, which is their attempt to unifiy application distribution a la the iPhone App Store. As of this writing, applications have to fit 2 criteria to make it into the listings, based on compatibility and security, although I’m not holding my breath that the Marketplace for Mobile won’t run into some of the arbitrary censorship of Apple’s operation.

Available as a beta right now is the free MyPhone service, which allows OTA syncing of contacts, calendars, photos, documents and more. I’ve been using the service for a day or so, and although it works just fine, it’s little more than a back-up service limited to 200Mb. Another issue as of this writing is that it will only run if your phone isn’t running with an Exchange server connection. Of course, it IS beta, and would expect that going forward it may get rolled into Microsoft’s other Live services. If you’re running Windows Mobile, and want to give it a spin, you can sign up for the beta here. Turnaround from signing up to being accepted was less than 24hrs for me.

[READ] Mircosoft MWC Press Release

A slew of new phones were announced, including updates to two of HTCs most popular devices. Both the Diamond and the Touch Pro had the number 2 slapped on the end of their names, got a bump in resolution to WVGA and will come with free upgrades to Windows Mobile 6.5 when it ships. The Touch Pro 2 keyboard is a full 5 row landscape keyboard. When the keyboard is exposed, it has multiple tilt angles for easier viewing.

After all the Mircosoft news on day one, it appeared that there was going to be little from the Android camp, but HTC busted out the Magic, a keyboard free Android device with the very much in demand on screen keyboard. The Magic will availabe through Vodaphone in various countries, but no word yet on a North American carrier. Overall though, the number of Android phones confirmed seems much lower than expected, which is surprising given the open source nature of the Google backed Linux OS.

One of the most interesting developments, both for Windows and Android, is Nvidia’s latest tech demo of its Tegra platform. The Tegra platform highlights the graphic chip makers mobile plans, delivering never before seen 3D performance on portable devices. They’re also reporting approximately 10 hrs of 1080p video playback when hooked up via HDMI to a 1080p TV, which quite the feat if they can maintain this on production devices. Besides entering the phone market, Nvidia is also planning on releasing $99 US mobile internet devices (MID).

In short, this years MWC certainly hasn’t disappointed, and there’s still two days to go.