Think Barcelona, and for most of the year, you’d think of the city’s love for FC Barcelona, Gaudi’s Modernist architecture and languid, late evenings with tapas and sangria. But for one week in March, the city plays host to over 90,000 attendees as they descend upon Barcelona for the annual mega Mobile World Congress. With all the big names in mobile technology gathered under one roof, MWC is where you get to see the latest and the greatest phones, gadgets and ideas— there’s a new device or technology practically everywhere you look! It was tough to narrow down, but we rounded up our favourite products and announcements from the show, and why they will matter to you in the months to come.

Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge

Out with the plastic and in with the aluminium-glass designs—Samsung has finally silenced critics with the MWC launch of the S6 and the S6 Edge, with both phones sporting a classy, metal-and-glass design that takes several design cues from the iPhone 6. Both sport gorgeous 5.1-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED screens and pack in Samsung's latest octa-core chipset with 3GB of memory for good measure. Then, there are the brighter f/1.9 aperture cameras (16MP rear and 5MP front) and, a pared down TouchWiz UI, all of which come together to make the S6 and its curvedscreen S6 Edge variant the most hotly anticipated and forward-looking phones when they hit the stores in April. They lack the removable battery and storage expandability of previous Samsung flagships, though.

Huawei Watch

You wouldn’t expect Huawei to push out something as classy as the new Watch, one of the best
looking smart watches we’ve seen to date. But here it is, clad in sapphire glass-protected display and offering traditional watch elements (the crown and the metal frame) in a smart watch—Huawei is gunning for a balance between smart watch functionality and the ease and good looks of a traditional watch. Like other Android Wear watches, the Huawei Watch has the usual features, such as a heart rate monitor and fitness tracking, plus a six-axis motion sensor and a barometric sensor.

Apple’s Spring Forward

Apple has a history of shunning big-ticket industry events, such as CES in Las Vegas and MWC Barcelona, but that doesn’t mean March was a quiet month for the Cupertino giant either! At its Spring Forward launch event, Apple unveiled a slew of products and initiatives that will ensure strong consumer demand and profits for quarters to come—here’s our look at the stuff that matters

Apple MacBook

Clearly, what stole the show was the new Retina MacBook—the thinnest Mac ever made. Available in silver, space gray and gold, it has an all-metal 900-gram enclosure and a 3.3-million pixel 12-inch Retina display. To make the MacBook this thin and light, Apple showed off a ton of innovations, including a slimmer keyboard, a layered battery configuration that allows more battery in the same amount of space and, a 67 per cent smaller logic board that requires no fan. It’s downright gorgeous, though the single “USB-C” port for power, USB and video connectivity is a bit of stretch.

ResearchKit

Apple put its weight behind the medical research community by launching ResearchKit, a framework that will allow researchers to gather and assess quality data from anyone with an iPhone, opening up the floodgates for primary research into asthma, Parkinson’s disease, breast cancer, diabetes and cardiac health. It may not sound as sexy as the MacBook, but this is one initiative that can do what Apple set out to do years ago—change the world.

Apple Watch

With its long overdue smart watch finally here, Apple gave a full demo (complements your iPhone), estimates on battery life (18 hours) and a launch price (sticker shock, mostly!). While the Sport variant is for $349 and the steel Apple Watch begins at $549, it’s the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition that made us gasp—starting price at a mindboggling $10,000, with models running as high as $17,000! We’re thinking less smart watch, more jewellery.

HTC One M9

Looking at the impeccable build quality of One M9, its clear HTC’s chosen refinement over advancement, polish over progress. But it’s no slouch under the hood either, packing in Qualcomm’s octa-core 64-bit Snapdragon 810 chip, 3GB RAM and storage expansion upto 128GB via microSD card. And, in a nod to the biggest complaint about the M8, HTC has swapped the brighter but lower-resolution “Ultrapixel” camera over to the front for better low-light selfies and armed the M9 with a more traditional 20-MP Sony sensory on the rear.

HTC Vive

HTC stole the show with the launch of the HTC Vive virtual reality (VR) headset in collaboration with gaming gurus Value, giving the virtual reality space some much-needed credibility. Sure, the HTC Vive gaming headset won’t work with your phone—instead you'll connect it to a PC via HDMI—and the combination of dual 1200x1080 screens and 70 internal sensors enable you to move around a 15x15 ft area as you explore the in-game virtual world…but the results are more impressive than anything we’ve seen so far, enough to convince us that VR is more than a washed-up buzzword of yore.

Sony Xperia M4 Aqua

Sony’s flagship Z series of phones have it all— good cameras, battery life, waterproofing… and premium pricing! With the Xperia M4 Aqua, Sony is bringing the features and aesthetics from its high-end phones to more affordable price levels, so you get a midrange waterproof device with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor and 2GB of RAM.

olmdesk@outlookindia.com