Another oddity in our biggest hits of the week was an early tip we received from an intrepid early-entrant to the convention. The Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 was photographed on a large screen standing proud at the massive Samsung booth that was opened early the next day. Even though Samsung really only “revealed” one new piece of hardware at the show, that single piece of hardware – and subsequent posts about that device’s power – ended up being more popular than many of our other hands-on and up-to-the-minute news posts.

From Brand New to Brand Reinforcement

While this year’s convention in Barcelona was larger than past years – at a new, larger venue with more floor space than ever – it ended up being commented on as more “dry” than shows in past years. That’s a rather subjecting thing to say, of course, but take note of massive releases at Mobile World Congress in the past, and you’ll see the trend. Instead of revealing brand new never-before-seen lines of devices and unique services at the convention, companies now appear to be showing more “here’s another from our already successful line” items – or no new hardware or software at all.

2010: The HTC Desire, Samsung Wave S8500 (with Bada!), Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10, Toshiba TG02 and K01, Acer Liquid e, and a whole lot more. [MWC 2010 tag portal]

2011: NVIDIA shows their Tegra roadmap and the superhero-themed code-names for processors we’re still seeing revealed today. Samsung reveals the Galaxy S II and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. LG shows the LG Optimus Pad (aka G-Slate) and the LG Optimus 3D. HTC shows a collection of smartphones and a tablet, as well as the Facebook phones Salsa and ChaCha. Google shows up with Eric Schmidt to speak at a main keynote while the Google Pod exploded unto the collective minds of attendees. [MWC 2011 tag portal]

2012: HTC revealed their HTC One series with the HTC One X, S, and V. ASUS shows a full line of Android-powered beastly tablets. The LG Optimus Vu, Sony XPERIA P, and game-changing Nokia Lumia 808 with 41-megapixel camera were all revealed – see more Nokia action in our 2012 MWC Nokia wrap-up specifically. Samsung seems to have started the trend of revealing their hero devices outside of MWC here with just two reveals at the event, one of them being the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. Qualcomm brought the Snapdragon S4 dual-core SoC, Texas Instruments showed the OMAP 5, and oddly, Microsoft showed up to bring on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Google again brought Eric Schmidt and another Google Pod. [MWC 2012 tag portal]

This year we saw ASUS show a new version of a concept they’ve released before in the ASUS PadFone Infinity and a re-skinned but perfectly recognizable 7-inch tablet called the FonePad – look like the Nexus 7 to you? (Incase you did not know, they made that too, revealing it in an early iteration back at CES 2012 at the NVIDIA keynote then re-revealing it at Google I/O 2012 as the Nexus 7.)

We also saw Nokia reveal two new smartphones that apply what they’ve learned with the Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices they’ve had on the market for several months to two new sizes: Lumia 720 and Lumia 520. Groups like HTC and Motorola decided against revealing anything new at all, with the HTC One having been revealed one week earlier than the conference and the Motorola RAZR lineup being the center of a rather low-traffic Motorola presence.

The folks at HP decided to take a swipe at creating a real-deal Android tablet (quite likely because of the odd success the HP TouchPad had after it was essentially given away post-WebOS cut) – have a peek at the HP Slate 7 and see the Beats grab hold again.

ZTE revealed a new rather large smartphone in the Grand Memo, here showing for the first time the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC – but the actual hardware won’t be in stores until the third quarter of this year. LG brought on a relatively impressive selection of devices including the LG Optimus G Pro – but that device was revealed well before the conference started as well. The only things LG actually revealed during the conference were items like the “world’s smallest wireless charger” and a bit of some (admittedly rather impressive) HD wireless transmission technology.

If you’ll have a look at each of the several hands-on posts we’ve got from LG, you’ll see that they’ve really only confirmed that they’re sticking with the design language they wrote with the still-popular LG Optimus G. These devices are going to be winners, but as far as LG revealing their biggest beasts of the year at MWC – that simply didn’t happen. A “true” replacement for the LG Optimus G will come later this year in an LG-run event separate from a press conference, we estimate – you can count on it. The most interested news this week touching LG was, without a doubt, their purchase of WebOS from HP – the repercussions of this have not yet begun to ripple!

Where are the heroes?

So you’ve got Google who, for the past two years, had set up a playland of Android bits and pieces throughout the convention, deciding here to continue to command like a sigil guardian. There was no official Google stand, but they were there – and they did hold one heck of a yearly party. You’ll see more of the Google Head Space action in our LG Optimus G Pro Photo Tour of MWC 2013 – complete with Tinie Tempah, Florence and the Machine, and one massive amount of bright lights and dancing Androids – and a Google Play lounge as well.

Samsung remained a magnificently massive force on the floor, even with but one new device – again, an expansion of a line they’ve been building for a while now. Samsung continued to drop massive amounts of cash on advertising around the city during the week (and beyond, we’re sure), and had what very well may have been the largest hands-on-centric booth at the convention. There’s some contention amongst analysts (and would-be analysts) who cannot decide whether Samsung has “abandoned” the show by only revealing one device or are supporting it more than ever with such a hearty floor presence – with devices, to be fair, not everyone there had seen before.

HTC had for the past several years used Mobile World Congress as their big blast-off point for the whole year. This year they – perhaps rather wisely – decided to have a launch a week before the Spain-based show. This way they were able to capture several days of press on technology news sites for themselves AND offer hands-on looks at the device – the HTC One – to convention-goers too.

The NVIDIA crew did indeed bring some fire to the show with hands-on looks at both a Tegra 4-toting developer tablet and the Phoenix Developer Platform smartphone, made specifically for Tegra 4i. I don’t know if I can drive this point home enough times, but here it goes again: while the Phoenix device was new, the main subject remained the Tegra 4i (and the Tegra 4), with NVIDIA letting the news about everything they had at MWC 2013 – more or less – out well before the convention started so as to keep more press time to themselves – more than they’d get on convention week.

Qualcomm also had a rather large presence on the floor with their vast array of demonstrations of both devices running their hardware and showings of what’s possible in the near future with services such as AllJoyn. Qualcomm’s biggest push this past week was, indeed, for AllJoyn and the “Internet of Everything” as it appears that we’re getting really, really close to the beginning of that connectivity hitting the market. As AllJoyn gets closer to real announcements of hardware manufacturer and developers being on-board, the AllJoyn Alliance begins its switch from just OeM/Developer outreach to public outreach so users know what it’s all about. See our features with both the President of the Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. Rob Chandhok and Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs as well as our Qualcomm tag portal for the full story.

But again, most announcements made were not for a brand new product or service, but for expansions of services and the strengthening of bonds – with the occasional smartphone or tablet reveal mixed in.

It’s the function of the convention that’s changing

While we’ve heard more than just a few people suggesting that this is the year the tech convention dies, I’d like to suggest a different possibility. The function of the tech convention is morphing. It’s the collection of reasons that hardware companies, software companies, developers, and the press head to these conventions and present themselves that’s changing.

In the past – for a while – a company would come to a large convention such as Mobile World Congress to reveal their newest products. Very recently, it’s become clear to many large companies that they’re able to get more attention – and prolonged attention – if they host their own separate event for each product they launch during the year.

The method of creating separate non-convention events held by manufacturers of hardware (and sometimes software) will soon be the unquestionably dominant expected way of things. They’ll also be the “reveal” point for any truly important product. For the press that’s able to travel to each of these events during the year, the larger conventions will grow less and less important to attend.

For everyone else, conventions like Mobile World Congress will continue to represent an opportunity to get hands-on time with products they might otherwise have to wait to see in stores – and they’ll continue to be great for networking person-to-person as well.

Evolution

For someone like you, the reader, this all means that you’ll get your hands-on looks at brand new devices spread out further throughout the year as opposed to having them all bunched up at CES, CTIA, MWC, and the like. And that’s fine with us!

Spread the announcement love more evenly across the year and we expect we’ll have a more tasty experience. Maintaining interest in the consumer technology universe through releases spread out over the year means a healthier – and less predictable – industry as a whole.

Or so we hope!

Have a peek at our [Mobile World Congress 2013 tag portal] to see everything we saw this year at the convention, and stay tuned to SlashGear for more. We’re expecting big releases from companies like Samsung, Motorola, and Google relatively soon – and that they’ll be breaking out the release love more frequently than restricting themselves to conventions such as these would otherwise allow. Excitement on the horizon!

Nokia has branded this event as the “world’s first live social 3D printing experience” – so fancy you’ll barely be able to handle it! Attendees as well as users at home were able to win customized cases for the 820, and even though there was no large news blast inside the main Nokia keynote, the demonstration was swamped almost non-stop. The hands-on video you’ll see here shows one of the very rare times when the 3 MakerBot Replicator 2 machines weren’t surrounded by a sea of bodies.

You’ll find the scaly example of a case shown above and below to be made of two separate pieces as you’ll be wanting to create when you’re busting out your own design. The reason for this is the relative rigidity of the material you’re creating with. With a second piece pushing out from the inside, you’ve got a bendable set of bits that function as buttons, as they should.

And that affords you the ability to have more than one color, too. You’ll be busting out a black case with yellow buttons – perhaps a case with your school’s colors? The outer bits and back of your Nokia Lumia 820 (or 520 in the very near future) are yours to create. Check the back of the case in the gallery below to see some key-carrying action as well!

Also be sure to check the rest of our Mobile World Congress 2013 coverage in the MWC 2013 tag portal right this minute. Keep your eyes to the Nokia tag for our reviews of the new 720 and 520 in the very near future too – hot stuff!

Samsung may not have brought the Galaxy S4 to MWC – we’ll have to wait until mid-March to see that – but the company still had one of the largest stands of the show. It’s key new product was the Galaxy Note 8.0, slotting in-between the Note II and the Note 10.1, and taking on the iPad mini. What’s interesting is that, while Samsung has been accused of slavishly copying Apple, the Note 8.0 does have a distinct difference from the Apple slate in the shape of the S Pen stylus.

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 hands-on:

Over at LG, the company was unabashed at taking on the Note II with its new Optimus G Pro, a 5.5-inch slab of beautiful LCD display and 13-megapixel camera tech. No stylus – though the Korean-spec demo units did have a fetching pull-out antenna for the digital TV tuner – but a 1080p display and speedy processor. LG fleshed out its cheaper models with new L series and F series devices, though it had spoiled the surprise some by pre-announcing them ahead of this week’s show.

Nokia had been more secretive, and so its new phones – the Lumia 520 and 720, taking the Windows Phone 8 range to five, and some cheap devices, the 105 and 301 – came as a moderate surprise. On the smartphone side, Nokia’s range is starting to look more and more thought through, though we’re still sticking with our stance that the Lumia 620 is the best of the bunch. Meanwhile, Nokia hit new price lows with the 105, a €15 ($20) handset ideal for developing markets and festival-goers alike, yet which didn’t abandon the company’s distinctive color schemes.

We also had a chance to sit down with some of Nokia’s top-level executives, and quizzed them on what little they’d spill on the roadmap (don’t hold your breath for a QWERTY Lumia any time soon) as well as their predictions for wearables and smart sensors.

Plucky upstarts ZTE and Huawei brought a brace of new devices along to Barcelona, though the reaction proved mixed. The ZTE Grand Memo played the big-screen card, overstepping the LG Optimus G Pro with a 5.7-inch screen, though arguably undermined it by opting for 720p resolution. Huawei made a similar schoolboy error with its Ascend P2, rocking high-end specifications everywhere but the number of pixels. ASUS, meanwhile, opted to go for confusion above all else, with the similarly-named FonePad and Padfone Infinit continuing to push the company’s modular strategy.

At the low-end, Firefox OS made its play for the developing market, with votes of support from eighteen operators worldwide and new handsets from Alcatel among others. At first glance, however, we’re less than impressed. The HTML5-based platform is sluggish on the cheap hardware, and it’s tough to see how – even with web apps – Mozilla plans to flesh out its portfolio in a way that legitimately challenges the ever-cheaper Android behemoth.

In chips, Qualcomm‘s Snapdragon 600 and 800 came out to flex their muscles, and were found in a number of the higher-profile phones of the week. NVIDIA had some chip news too, though the most exciting phone to use the new Tegra 4 was the Phoenix Developer Platform smartphone, which will allow coders and manufacturers to get to grips with Tegra 4i before it arrives later in 2013.

NVIDA Phoenix Developer Platform hands-on:

After two years of incredible public stands, Google took a more clandestine approach at Barcelona this year, holding a few private meetings rather than pushing people down an Android-themed slide like in 2012. We caught up with director of Android design experience Matias Duarte to talk Google Now and how it might just be the future of Android, as well as how it helped shape Google Glass. Duarte, unsurprisingly, has strong ambitions for Android, going so far as describing it as the “OS for humanity.”

Nonetheless, while MWC had its gems, the show felt more humble than in previous years. The new venue, a sprawling flow of halls joined by a serpentine hallway, is certainly far improved over the old location, but where the Congress of years past has seen flagships debut and companies stake their reputation, this year it felt a little like those same firms were holding their breath; saving their energies for individual events where they alone could control the news.

On a broader note, however, it’ll be interesting to see how the trade show calendar weathers the change in product launch strategy over the rest of the year. While smaller shows will happen in-between now and September, many eyes will be IFA 2013 early that month. The past few years, Samsung has used the Berlin show to debut several high-profile products – the Galaxy Note II and Galaxy Camera in 2012, for instance – but with the Korean firm withholding its big launches from CES and MWC, it’s unclear whether the Germans will get a headline-maker or not.

All this is just a sample of our coverage from this week; you can find all of our Mobile World Congress 2013 content in the show hub.

Spend any time talking future tech to Nokia’s executives, and you realize there are two themes running through their predictions. First, and perhaps most familiar to most industry watchers, there’s the relentless advance of sensors and the complexity of devices, with capabilities always evolving. Nokia differs in some respects in how its management see the form-factor of those devices: rather than a single, increasingly powerful phone in your pocket, all three VPs talked about a resurgence in dedicated devices; products that, as Marco Ahtisaari described it, “do a few things really well.”

Secondly, and arguably a more contrarian stance than others in the segment, is a desire to actually reduce the attention that’s paid to smartphones and mobile devices. Ahtisaari coined the phrase “heads up” internally to describe it, though it’s become an ethos for the long-term shared by others in the design team, like Stefan Pannenbecker.

“We see sometimes couples, out in a restaurant, romantically texting each other, or broadcasting… so that type of phenomena is interesting, and in a way bugs us a little bit, because the question is how can we get the “heads up”?” the Industrial Design chief explained to us. “So we do a lot of work on all kinds of levels in order to think that scenario through: what does that mean? So we’re interested in that type of topic, how do we get people’s heads up again.”

Nokia isn’t expecting to address that question in the next few months, or even the next couple of years. As Marco Ahtisaari told us, it’s an example of the company’s longer-term planning, though as an internal culture of design it has an impact on the Lumia devices we’ll see over the coming years. “The one thing I would say is that I talk about the “heads-up” principle in the studio, it’s like a 20-year principle. Creating computing technology that’s with us that doesn’t require more attention” he said.

“And part of this pinning-to-Start [in the Windows Phone homescreen] is one example of that; things we’ve done with the glanceable, low-power mode on our devices in the past is an example of that; the NFC work we’re doing is an example of that,” Ahtisaari counted off. “You just touch the environment: the world becomes your interface, rather than having to go through twelve swipe-swipe-swipe. So that’s another component of that future, I think, and very important as we go to more distributed objects that do only a few things.”

Having got to a point where a person’s smartphone is often also their camera, their music player, their fitness tracker, and more, it might seem counter-intuitive to be considering breaking apart those components and turning again to individual gadgets. However, there’s a strong feeling within Nokia that specificity has its own advantages.

“I think there’ll be room for more and more dedicated devices that do a few things really well again” Ahtisaari predicts. “And that is slightly a contrarian view, but I think what we’ll see is increasing complexity and ability… you can either shortcut through the environment, but this means also space for dedicated devices that do a few things really well. Yes, a phone, but other functionalities too.”

Right now, all three executives are coy on what, exactly, Nokia’s portfolio of answers to these questions might look like. However, they’re more vocal on what they probably won’t be, and the approach seems less “in your face” than Glass, and more cautious than the “confident” search and prediction of Google Now.

“I’m not going to speculate [about Glass] because time will tell with regards what is the right execution with regards to this idea of “heads-up”, so I think we’ve a lot of work to do, frankly, so I’m not going to speculate about that” Pannenbecker said. “But I think, as I said, this is for me an area that we want to engage in, I mean, this topic of heads-up not this particular solution for example. As I said, there’s a whole bandwidth of opportunities, and I think we as a company need to look very deeply into these opportunities, and then commit.”

For Harlow, the question is of need: or, more accurately, the balance of plain geek appeal – as perhaps Google Glass embodies – against relevance to mass-market consumers. “I think that it’s just as true in any of these new areas that you have to solve the fundamental consumer problems, and you can’t… you innovate for the sake of innovation” the smartphones boss argued. “Usually there’s a small number of people who find them really cool, and the vast majority don’t see a reason why. That the use case is so on-the-point that they don’t see it.”

In fact, there’s a sense among all three that the Glass strategy – that is, taking what components might usually be associated with a smartphone, and making them something you can wear – is too easy a way out. Yes, there are battery challenges, and persistent wireless demands, and the need to craft an interface and interaction paradigm that suits a more hands-off usage style, but a wearable computer doesn’t necessarily address either user-need nor go far enough in liberating users from the tyranny of persistent, connected distraction.

“I think that’s why you see fitness all over the place, because clearly if people stick with it then it can help solve a problem” Harlow explains, “but that’s where I think the energy will really come from, either that they solve latent needs that consumers can’t necessarily articulate, or solve unknown problems that they have and that sensors would solve.”

While the most attention has been paid to Nokia’s evolving Windows Phone handset range, the company has also been working on matching accessories, pushing ideas like wireless charging and NFC pairing. That focus on a well-designed, integrated ecosystem looks likely to spawn a family of shared technologies, each delivering its own component part of the overall usability.

“That’s something which we’re working on, and I’m not in a position… I will not talk about specific solutions to that, but absolutely that is a challenge for us” Pannenbecker agreed. “For us as designers. Because ultimately again it comes to better problems. This is more what we think a smartphone is supposed to be [holds up phone], but I think obviously there’s other ways of doing that.”

Nokia hasn’t been afraid of riffing on those possibilities in the past with concept designs, however. Its 2009 “Mixed Reality” headset predated Google Glass, and was envisaged with its own suite of accessories and sensors: a motion-tracking wristband for navigating a wearable display, for instance, along with wireless audio. Meanwhile, the idea of paring back information in a more context-driven way has also been explored, such as the Nokia-prompted “Frame” concept device that rethought the smartphone into a window that blurred the physical and digital worlds. Arguably it’s an idea that has expressed itself in Nokia City Lens, the augmented reality app now publicly available for Windows Phone.

Just as Google Now relies on its context engine, so has Nokia Research been pushing its own predictive technologies to better focus the user-experience. We mentioned the 2009 “Linked Internet UI Concept” from Nokia Research to Marco Ahtisaari, a project which learned from social networking attention and prioritized updates and geo-location of those people it calculated the user was most interested in, and asked him where the company’s roadmap was on integrating such ideas into its software.

“Partly that’s a question of focus” he said, pointing out that Nokia needed first of all to prove itself with a successfully selling Lumia range of phones. “Like I said, the most important thing we can do now is show momentum. These are things we definitely work on.”

However, he also argued that there is risk in making mobile devices too intelligent – or portraying them as having intelligence – because you run the risk of leaving the user feeling at odds with their device, not enabled by it. “If this makes sense there’s robots and people. People versus robots” Ahtisaari said, somewhat cryptically. “We’re on the side of people, in general. What I mean by that is certain personalization you can do, goes a long way. And the other example, if you took that, would be “hello, we just reconfigured your phone, it’s got all the people here, and we set it up for you”.”

In fact, Nokia could already integrate that sort of contextual technology into its phones today; the reservation is one of how the mainstream user – not the Glass aficionado – might react to that. “We’ve all of that auto-magic today, it’s just doing it in a way that doesn’t feel creepy, or has violated what you do” he argued. “It’s striking that balance. But definitely, the two things you’ve mentioned – contextually and prediction – are important.”

It’s early days for Nokia to look too far beyond smartphones; the Lumia line-up has only just reached five Windows Phone 8 handsets, the platform itself still holds an extreme minority share, and there’s no sign of a tablet on the horizon, at least not publicly. Nonetheless, it seems we can expect something other than a set of Windows Phone goggles.

“I’m not going to speculate [about Glass] because time will tell with regards what is the right execution with regards to this idea of “heads-up”, so I think we’ve a lot of work to do, frankly, so I’m not going to speculate about that” Pannenbecker demurred. “But I think, as I said, this is for me an area that we want to engage in, I mean, this topic of heads-up not this particular solution for example. As I said, there’s a whole bandwidth of opportunities, and I think we as a company need to look very deeply into these opportunities, and then commit.”

Though the strategies may be very different, there’s one thing Nokia and Google do agree on: the name of the game is elevating users from the voracious attention-soak of the touchscreen, not finding more ways of putting it in front of them. “If they require as much attention as a smartphone, then no more human contact” Ahitsaari concluded. “That’s the perspective we have, we’re still in the people-connecting business.”

“It’s really a question, “is there a large enough audience out there?” or “are the people who have QWERTY today intending to move in this direction?” and we really don’t want to be on the wrong side of that movement” Harlow, executive vice president of Smart Devices, told us. That’s despite a clear message from some users that a physical keyboard is high on their list of priorities.

“We still continue to evaluate because we do get the request a lot, and it’s funny that there are a lot of people that absolutely want to use a physical keyboard, they like the security of that” Harlow conceded. “Even though, I think the virtual keyboard of Windows Phone is phenomenal, especially the level of autocorrect, it’s really, really good.”

Unsurprisingly, Nokia isn’t ruling out any particular device, no matter how great the abundance of caution over QWERTY today. That means the market reception to BlackBerry’s upcoming Q10, the first BlackBerry 10 device to include one of the Canadian company’s legendary thumbboards, is likely to be of particular interest to Nokia as it figures out its next steps in Windows Phone.

“It’s something that we’re constantly looking at: next form-factors, what should we do next” Harlow told us, though pointed out that even those who really do want a physical ‘board are a dying breed. “One of the things that we see is that the number of people who are using, or are interested in using, a QWERTY continues to decline.”

Pixel’s appeal on a purely hardware basis is undeniable: it’s a beautifully designed notebook, with an incredibly high resolution touchscreen and the same crisp lines that we liked from Google’s first Cr-48 Chromebook. However, its huge price puts Chrome OS up against full notebooks from Apple, Sony, and others, despite the relative limitations of the cloud-centric platform, a completely different market from earlier, highly affordable Chromebooks.

For Duarte, however, Pixel’s success won’t solely be measured by pure sales. “I think that Pixel is really exciting, because I think that Pixel shows the way that the boundaries between the different types of computing are blurring” he explained to us. “I think it’s great that the Chrome team is doing that, I think it’s great that the Chrome team is allowing Google to get into people’s lives with touchscreens on a desktop form-factor.”

That’s not a point of view shared by everybody in the industry, and in fact it puts Duarte and Google in the same camp as Microsoft and its hardware partners, rather than with Apple. Steve Jobs memorably decried the usability of touch notebooks, and Tim Cook has since made similar arguments, that reaching across a keyboard to tap at a display simply isn’t ergonomically satisfying.

Duarte disagrees, saying that despite what the MacBook makers think, users themselves are asking for a touchscreen approach. “I think that’s a real trend, that touch on laptops and on desktop form-factors is the way that people want to interact with computers” he says. “I think every screen should be a touchscreen in the future, regardless if it has a keyboard or not.”

Despite the overlap, then, between Android – which has touch at its heart – and Chrome OS – designed for more traditional form-factors – the two platforms still have a future as independent projects. According to Duarte, that will be the case for as long as it makes functional sense: the two OSes converging, perhaps, on a commonality of features as Google develops them.

“Google is excellent at diversifying, and experimenting” he told us. “And I think what Chrome OS does well – they’re getting better at, and it’s being reflected in what Android does well in succession – Chrome on Android is the best browser we’ve ever had, and we would not be at that level without the Chrome team doing the work that they do, without the Chrome OS team learning the things that they do, and learning to understand, for example, how to work on touchscreens.”

Meanwhile, what was originally a smartphone, and then a tablet, OS has been gaining more functionality to bring it in line with a desktop platform, though Duarte says that it’s still not quite there year. “Of course Android has also been evolving, and I think it’s terrific the way that we are gaining capabilities on a day-by-day basis” he said. “For example in Jelly Bean we announced multi-user support, and that opens up a range of use-cases, but ultimately, still, the two platforms meet different needs.”

That also means Android playing more readily with accessories and other devices, as it continues its trend toward being the one “OS for humanity” as Duarte himself described it. “One of the things that was great that we did in Honeycomb, was we included much better support for peripherals” the designer said. “So if you go hook up your Nexus 10 to a Bluetooth keyboard, or even a Bluetooth trackpad, you’ll find you have a much better experience with that.”

Despite the convergence that has already happened, Duarte points out however, neither Android nor Chrome OS are at the point where they satisfy the overall needs of all users. “Until we have one solution for Google that can really capture everything, it makes sense for us to continue to develop two platforms” he explained. Exactly how long that development will take is unclear, but it may take some time before Chrome OS – or a flavor of it – achieves the same market dominance as Android enjoys.

The hockey puck wireless charger, dubbed the WCP-300, charges up Qi-compatible devices, like LG’s own Nexus 4, Spectrum 2, and Optimus G Pro, and it sits at just 6.9cm in diameter. The back plugs into a traditional microUSB port in order to feed juice to devices wirelessly. However, only the Spectrum 2 and the Nexus 4 support the wireless charger in the US.

Of course, though, LG will be releasing more smartphones in the future with Qi wireless charging functionality, and the company hopes that more smartphones will jump on board with the wireless charging protocol as well. After all, the wireless charger doesn’t do much good if you don’t have a phone that supports it.

LG will be releasing the wireless charger in South Korea this week at a price of 65,000 won (around $60). However, the company expects to roll out the accessory worldwide over time, so it’ll arrive in the US at some point this year we’re hoping. Plus, $60 isn’t too bad of a price for the world’s smallest wireless charger, so hopefully LG keeps it that way when it eventually comes to the US.

Dropbox first launched in 2007, just when smartphones were beginning to take off, and the service was only able to sync files between different computers, but eventually the company added support for a smartphones and tablets. As for the future, Dropbox is constantly looking to expand and offer more features to its users. Just earlier this month, Dropbox introduced a new admin panel for businesses.

Houston also was trying to passive-aggressively get mobile carriers and manufacturers in on the Dropbox fun. He says that there’s “untapped opportunity” for carriers that could partner up with Dropbox, using a possible family plan as an example. Houston says that Dropbox could “tie a family together in a way that’s broader than just a billing relationship.”

Houston also mentioned the great partnership opportunities with handset manufacturers, and used Samsung and HTC as an example, where users who log in or sign up with a Samsung or HTC phone get a certain amount of extra storage for free. Of course, manufacturers who have their own cloud service are a little nervous to jump ship — as Samsung was — but Houston mentions that by using Dropbox, manufacturers can build the cloud storage service “onto all these core features on the phone.”

[via CNET]

Just like Passbook, Samsung Wallet offers location-based push notifications that alert users when they can use the various items that are stored in their Wallet account. Plus, the app provides real-time updates for various things like membership points and flight changes to boarding passes, and the app can display bar codes to be scanned.

Samsung already has a handful of US partners on board, including Walgreens, MLB, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Lufthansa. The app’s interface looks freakishly similar to Apple’s own Passbook app, which isn’t too surprising, although we’re sure that Samsung included some of their own flavorings into the app.

Currently, Samsung Wallet does not support payments, but it does support NFC, and it’s likely that the company will partner up with a credit card company to offer NFC payments in the future at some point. The beta API is now available for developers, with a launch date set for March 7. Samsung is expected to announce the Galaxy S IV on March 14, so the company’s Wallet could be ready in time for the new smartphone.

[via The Next Web]

According to WildTangent, the Sony Xperia X will lead the charge with the Xperia smartphone universe, the team promoting their service with a handful of free WildCoins if they register WildTangent on their Xperia device. WildCoins are used by WildTangent members to rent and purchase games for their device. In addition to being able to rent a game for a limited period of time, users are able to purchase that app outright – and when they do so, any money spent on rental is applied to the purchase automatically.

Many games are are available for free as well, they being subsidized – to so speak – by the advertisements they carry in-game. The titles Great Little War Game and Babel Rising 3D are just two of the next-generation of devices coming on quick, and completely for free. You’ll also find the now-classic Fruit Ninja and ultra-powerful third-person shooter game SHADOWGUN there as well.

Have a peek at the Wild Tangent universe for yourself if you’ve got an Xperia device, and consider having a tap with it even if you don’t – it’s growing more universal by the day! Also be sure to have a look at the rest of our Mobile World Congress 2013 coverage through the MWC 2013 tag portal – more up to the minute news blasts and hands-on action than you can handle!

While “smart devices” may be the buzzword of the past few years, the practical implementation still leaves plenty to be desired. Individual pieces of hardware may be smarter in their own right, but that doesn’t mean they play nicely together, Duarte pointed out in frustration.

“Together we live in a very fractured operating system world. My awesome digital camera doesn’t interoperate with my laptop, doesn’t interoperate with my phone” he explained. “These things have different OSes, they work differently, the apps are different, there’s no common account knowledge between those, and that’s just broken. We should fix that.”

While common networking systems and low-power wireless are increasingly acting as the technological bridge between devices, the languages they’re each speaking is holding up real development. Duarte is confident that Android should be that common glue; in fact, he says it’s the reason he joined Google in the first place.

“I can’t wait to have Android on every device, on every screen, and on things that aren’t screens” he told us. “That’s why I came to Google; that’s why I’m excited about working on Android. Because I really see it as an operating system for humanity.”

In many ways all this is a sentiment we’ve heard before from many of the big software and networking companies, each talking about their own products and their own particular opinion of how the “internet of things” should evolve. However, Duarte argues that Android’s suitability for the job is more than just its functionality and its flexibility.

“The momentum that [Android has] got is allowing us to then really take an operating system and have it tie everything together. We should have one operating system that provides the foundation for the future of digital humanity. I truly believe that. In fact, I think it’s inevitable, because you get so much more power when everything can talk to each other, and interoperate.” The vital factor as the designer sees it is that Android is transparent in both how it communicates and in what it says. “I passionately believe that if we’re going to have that one operating system it should be an open operating system that anybody can take, anybody can modify, anybody can inspect, nobody can own.”

“Because it’s open, it means that all the innovation that we bring to it is “inspectable” by anybody” Duarte insists, perhaps the most animated we’ve seen him since talking about the interplay of Google Now and Glass. “There’s no funny-business going on; no one government, no one corporation can own it. It’s kind of like a patrimony of humanity: everything that goes in Android.”

WIth the B15 you’re getting a dual-core 1Ghz Cortex A9 processor powering a 4-inch 800 x 480 pixel resolution display along with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage. There’s a microSD card slot inside able to take on 32GB of additional storage, and the whole phone is ready to fit in the palm of your hand easily – especially if you’re a construction worker or massive person of sorts, generally the type to get into situations where such damage-resistant features as this one has will come in handy. But the audience this device has is not limited to those that pick up and smash down large rocks!

You’ll be working with aluminum (or aluminium, depending on how British you are), and shock-absorbing rubber on the outside. This is a device that will not – ever – need a case to protect it. The display up front is covered by Gorilla Glass (though we’re not sure at the moment if it’s Gorilla Glass or Gorilla Glass 2), and the aluminum and rubber frame comes up ever-so-slightly around the edges so if your device falls to a flat surface, the display will be further protected. You’ll see a couple of DEATH-DEFYING DROPS in the hands-on video above.

The CAT B15 is able to drop from a height of 6 feet, fall onto concrete, and survive to tell the tale. You’ll also be working with 3 feet of water protection as the whole of the device is sealed with more shock-absorbing rubber for the safety of its innards. Heat is also protected against up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit as well as cold, down to -4 degrees Fahrenheit.

You’ll be picking this device up in March if you live in one of the 50 countries the device is launched in across the world at first for right around 299 Euro. At the moment though we’ve heard from CAT that the device is planned for USA release in April, pricing has not been decided as deals with carriers have not been finalized. We shall see soon enough!

Be sure to have a peek at the rest of our up to the minute news blast and hands-on collection in the Mobile World Congress 2013 tag portal here on SlashGear. We’ll be here all week, and we’ve already seen quite a bit of excellent bits and pieces from manufacturers and developers of mobile greatness alike!

With the LG Optimus F7 you’re working with the more advanced collection of specifications of the two smartphones in this line. It’ll be coming in both black and white and features a 4.7-inch True HD IPS LCD display coming in at 312 pixels per inch – hot stuff! Inside you’ll find a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor as well as 2GB of RAM. Inside you’ve got 8GB of storage and you’ll have a microSD card slot to expand memory by up to 32GB.

The back of the LG Optimus F7 has an 8 megapixel camera while the front features a camera at 1.3 megapixels, and the battery under the hood is 2540mAh – that’s massive for a device as “small” as this. You’ll be rolling out with Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean and a software experience that’s nearly identical to that of the LG Optimus G and G Pro – though a bit slower due to the ever-so-slightly-lesser processor. They’re both working with Snapdragons though, so you’ll be rolling hard one way or another.

In the LG Optimus F5 you’ve got the smallest friend you’ve held in LG’s 2013 lineup, here working with a 4.2-inch IPS display – 256ppi in this case. You’ll find this machine to be working with a 1.3 megapixel camera up front, 5 megapixels on the back, and a 2150mAh battery inside. The processor in the F5 is another Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core, this time running at 1.2Ghz – still formidable, even here in 2013 amongst the wave of quad-core devices crashing in.

Have a peek at both devices above and below and let us know if you’re pumped up about these current-generation LG experiences hitting the USA – or the international market if you’re over the sea. We’re over the sea right this minute too, mind you, covering Mobile World Congress this whole week. Be sure to hit up our MWC 2013 tag portal for more hands-on and up to the minute news blast action!

In addition, CNBC, Time, and Fortune media partners co-presented the awards and joined Walliams on stage, as did GSMA’s CEO and the judging panel. In addition to the Global Mobile awards, GSMA also announced Government Leadership Awards, which gives governments from around the globe recognition for mobile technology leadership and innovation.

While the complete list of Global Mobile winners is too long to detail, some notable award designations among them include “Best Mobile Enabled Consumer Electronics Device” to Samsung for its GALAXY Camera, “Best Mobile App for Consumers” to Facebook, “Best Smartphone” to the Samsung Galaxy S3, “Device Manufacturer of the Year” to Samsung, and “Best Mobile Tablet” to ASUS/Google for the Nexus 7. Samsung was by far the runaway winner, having also received several awards not listed above.

Said GSMA’s CEO John Hoffman, “Through these awards, we are proud to shine the light on the mobile industry’s many innovators and leaders, from all corners of the world. This year’s new categories reflected the industry’s reach into many new sectors and we received more than 600 high-quality entries from across the mobile ecosystem. We would like to congratulate all Global Mobile Awards winners and thank the many hundreds of companies and organisations that support these awards by entering each year.”

[via PR Newswire]

This app is what the company calls its first “highly intelligent personal assistant app”, and it works quite similarly to the ever-growing family of natural language-toting apps across the gamut. This means you’re working with the ability to ask questions or tell it to do tasks for you in several different ways, and it’ll remember your preferences while you do it. This app is fully prepared to work with developers from around the appsphere as well, with full SDK availability coming up immediately if not soon for you and yours – that means you’ll be able to call up any app that decides to integrate Ingego support.

Your preferences are also connected to an online repository of sorts, able to remember what you like and what you’ve told it to do across multiple devices. There’s both a browser-based interface and an app interface, both of them working to bring you ease in task-doing from your mobile device – or your desktop computer, if you like.

Down the line, this app – and apps created for Indigo with Artificial Solutions’ software developer kit – will be able to do anything from creating a series of calendar events to controlling their television schedule. Hook it up with the internet browser on your refrigerator in the future – the sky’s the limit!

Developers interested in checking out Indigo should hit up hello-indigo.com and have a peek – meanwhile you non-developer users out there should head there as well and have a click around. Natural language commands will be yours – sooner than later! Then of course you’ll also want to check out the rest of the action we’ve collected and pushed earlier this week and into the future at Mobile World Congress 2013 in our MWC 2013 portal!

The LG Pocket Photo is 4.76 x 2.83 x 0.94 inches in size and will be taking some little packets of photo paper – special fancy photo paper, mind you – that you’ll be able to purchase individually. The final result is not unlike what you’d create with an instant Polaroid camera, with an image rather true to what you had on the screen. And it’s just so cute!

It’s not entirely clear at the moment if you’ll need to be using an LG smartphone or not with this device at the moment, and you are able to work with Bluetooth as well as NFC, but one thing is for sure: you will need the Pocket Photo app. Which doesn’t do anything for you if you’ve not got the printer, of course. The app is also able to do some basic photo editing and generate QR codes that you’ll subsequently be able to print as well.

Note: we started the process here with the LG Optimus G Pro, then found it easier to just transfer the photo we had to the LG Optimus G units they had on display because they’d already had the Pocket Photo app installed. The resulting photo looks fabulous even though it’d been taken with one device, transferred to the other, then printed wirelessly with an instant process.

The printing process this machine uses is Zink – that’s Zero Ink paper technology. The process is a combination of efforts between the LG Pocket Photo and the paper itself, the paper having a layer of dye crystals that change color according to heat generated by the device. The resulting photo is ever-so-slightly warm when you receive it and doesn’t have any ink to smear – it’s instantly ready to be touched, if you like.

This device will be coming to greater Europe in April and will be costing you right around 130 Euro MSRP. At the moment there don’t seem to be any solid final price or release dates released for the device – we’re hoping soon as well!

Have a peek at the Mobile World Congress 2013 tag portal to see more up to the minute news blasts from Barcelona as well as more hands-on action than you can handle!

The choice of show is because GM sees its drive to adopt 4G as about more than just fitting off-the-shelf hardware: it’s about making the car another node on the network. While this isn’t the first time we’ve seen mobile hotspot functionality in a car, it is the tightest integration of that connection to the car’s underlying systems. That makes a big difference, Abram points out, when it comes to what you can actually do with the data that the car is producing, such as fuel efficiency, speed, direction, engine status, entertainment, and more.

For instance, there’s GM’s own mobile app which can be used to remotely control several of the features in the car: lock and unlock it from wherever you are in the world, sound the horn, and turn on or off the lights. With a persistently connected car, however, the app can also display real-time statistics, such as fuel levels.

It goes beyond time-saving measures, however. GM’s demo vehicle has three cameras on the interior and four outside, covering the front two passengers and the rear seat, and all four of the outward directions. They can be reviewed on the dashboard – handy, if you’re parking up and want to make sure you’re not too far from the curb – or streamed over the 4G to a smartphone or tablet. GM envisages rear seat passengers being able to hold Skype calls while being driven around, for instance, or the car automatically alerting you, complete with video recordings, if it’s hit or damaged while you’re away.

The potential for streaming also includes entertainment, using the 4G to push entertainment content to the dashboard (albeit only when you’re parked up). However, the concept car can also push its streamed video over WiFi to a tablet, so rear passengers could watch their own content rather than what’s on the integrated screens.

Not all of these features will be present when GM’s 4G cars actually begin to roll out to buyers; there won’t be cameras, at least not initially, for instance. However, the car company is hoping that developers will see the potential of being persistently online, and swiftly come up with new functionality to take advantage of that.

“We’ve taken one of the variables out of the equation,” Abram explains, pointing to the fact that those coders taking advantage of the APIs GM revealed back at CES will be able to make the assumption that drivers have a persistent data connection. One lingering question is exactly how much drivers will have to pay for actual data, or at least to access the service; Abram wouldn’t discuss fees, beyond pointing out that OnStar is a subscription-based service (current prices start at around $19 per month). That could have implications for how apps consume data, if it’s billed on a per-MB style basis.

That may well be an evolving issue, Abram points out, as drivers, GM, and developers get to grips with the potential of having 4G in your vehicle. The infotainment chief hopes that the key apps users are familiar with and already consider essential – Pandora, Spotify, and others – will transition over to the GM system, but also that we’ll see new and imaginative software that takes specific advantage of the context that you’re in a vehicle.

GM needs developers to there, but meanwhile it will be tailoring its connectivity message across its various brands. That’s going to take some careful explanation, Abram says, differing not only on a marque by marque basis, but by individual cars too, depending on the priorities of their target audiences. For instance, GM’s current message around the Chevy Sonic is to do with smartphone integration, while for the CUE system the focus has been on how interwoven it is through the car.

Standard 4G will begin showing up in 2015 model year GM vehicles from Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac, with AT&T providing its LTE network, on US and Canadian forecourts sometime in 2014. However, the company plans to expand the service across Europe and other territories in time.

In Quadrant, the Galaxy Note 8.0 scored 6,848 overall, with a CPU score of 14,608, memory score of 5,386, I/O of 11,035, and 2D/3D of 1,000/2,211. That’s actually more impressive in all but the CPU category than the Galaxy Note 10.1, running Samsung’s 1.4GHz Exynos quadcore, though the 8-inch tablet’s software is likely to get a last-minute polish before it ships.

Turning to SunSpider, the JavaScript benchmark of browser performance, the new Galaxy Note completed the test in 1,021.7ms. Faster is better in SunSpider; in contrast, the iPad mini completed it in 1,698.9ms.

In practical terms, we had no trouble multitasking on the Galaxy Note 8.0, even when using Samsung’s window-in-window system which allows you to view two apps on-screen simultaneously. The most pressing test, of course, relates to digital inking: if the experience of writing and drawing on-screen isn’t smooth and accurate, then the pen becomes near-worthless.

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 hands-on:

Happily Samsung got that right too, and it’s the same clean ink-flow as we’ve seen on the Galaxy Note II, simply with more space to take advantage of. That could be the best argument for the 8-inch model overall, in fact; the Note II is pocketable, but arguably not quite large enough to replace a typical notebook, something the Note 8.0 is far closer in size to.

We’ve more on the Galaxy Note 8.0 in our full hands-on.

Rob Chandhok has a rather impressive selection of titles at Qualcomm, including first and foremost being the President of Qualcomm Internet Services. Chandhok is also President of the Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc., as well as the Senior Vice President of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. – and our talk with him this week comes via Barcelona, where we’re exploring the globe’s greatest new wireless bits and pieces courtesy of Mobile World Congress 2013. Chandhok was keen to speak about the reasons AllJoyn will be an important point of interest for consumers in the near future – and why the whole platform is open source.

Chandhook made it all clear: “If we work on a video protocol – we haven’t announced that specifically just yet, but you can see how the following to audio [which we've just announced] would be video – and I want to show slides, I would want it to be: If I’m in the same room as the projector, I want to have [wireless, instant] access to the projector. We think we know how to do some of those experiences. But we also know that we’re not going to be the only people that do those sorts of experiences, and that’s why we want this to be an open platform.”

At one end of the equation there’s developers who Qualcomm wants to work with the AllJoyn platform and create amazing connected experiences. On the other end, there’s the hardware manufacturers that Qualcomm wants to be on board with integrating AllJoyn connectivity and functionality into their products – then everyone can connect. And the fact that this platform is open source is key from start to finish.

“It’s a little bit atypical for Qualcomm to say ‘here’s something that we’re going to open source,’ but if you heard Paul Jacobs yesterday in his keynote, he was very clear about how committed the company is to the open source platform. And the reason is simple. For Qualcomm, it’s more useful for things to be connected. It’s really straightforward.”

Chandhok made it clear that if a developer were to want to create a project using AllJoyn on a competitor to Qualcomm’s hardware, and said to him (representing Qualcomm) “will you help me?” He’d have to say “no – I’ll give you a solution based on our products, I will differentiate and I will compete based on the quality of our product. But the ecosystem has to be open in order for there to be an ecosystem.”

Several sets of possibilities and were discussed as well, including the possibility of products hitting the market with AllJoyn integrated by the holiday season of 2013 – near the end of the year, that is. AllJoyn is being pushed as an ingredient brand, one that, like Bluetooth or NFC, is included in the list of awesome connectivity features a device has embedded. To make this reality possible with AllJoyn as a real technology on the market, the AllJoyn Alliance exists to first seek out and hook up with and help out hardware manufacturers as well as developers to integrate across the board.

Then comes marketing to the public, making the AllJoyn mark something that people will look for in products in many products – and not just televisions, speakers, and smartphones. Devices like refrigerators and ovens are being discussed by Qualcomm as being connected as well, all of this creating the Internet of Everything that’s quickly becoming a reality, here and now. While devices like refrigerators, they having a rather long lifetime in the wild, will see slower adoption of AllJoyn services, Chandhok made a very general guess – not quite a prediction – at AllJoyn proliferation in 2 to 3 years.

There’s a growing expectation out there now, noted Chandhok, by consumers that their devices will continue to become more intelligent – all of their devices, even the ones that’ve never really been all that intelligent in the first place. The simplest way to put how AllJoyn will take part in this expectation, Chandhok made clear, is ti make AllJoyn useful. “If it’s useful, users will want it. if it’s annoying, users wont want it.”

This technology is working via a wi-fi connection – especially amazing here at Mobile World Congress as massive amounts of connections are being blasted to and fro from device to device without end. The transmission of graphics here are said by LG to be superior to all other similar technologies that’ve appeared in the past – we’ll have to see about Miracast when it takes hold in the near future to compare. LG also maintains that it uses “less than 50 percent” of the power that competing services offer.

LG makes this claim saying that the amount of power needed by the smartphone’s processor and associated hardware is less with their solution, therefor draining the battery slower. They also say that the picture looks correct each time you connect because of instant screen formatting – no matter what display you’re connected to, your picture will be optimized. A compression of video is also claimed between the camera and the television – though how it works when it’s a live-in-action game, it’s not quite clear.

We’ve seen some rather beastly things coming from LG this week, and more than just phones, mind you. Have a peek at the timeline below as well as at the LG tag portal for more information on LG’s releases in the recent past. And don’t forget to check the Mobile World Congress 2013 portal for more up to the minute news blasts and hands-on action than you can handle!

The HomeSync box itself is the size of a couple of stacked DVD cases, finished in metallic-effect plastic, and with nothing on the front bar an LED indicator. On the back, meanwhile, there’s a microUSB port, two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI output, and an S/PDIF digital audio output, along with an ethernet port. Inside there’s a 1.7GHz dualcore processor, together with a 1TB hard-drive, 8GB of space for apps the like, 2GB of RAM, and WiFi a/b/g/n (2.4/5GHz) plus Bluetooth 4.0.

That hard-drive is used for local storage, including offloading content from your phone or tablet, though as you’d imaging the HomeSync is also set up to stream from the cloud. It integrates with the AllShare app on Samsung mobile devices, too, for one-touch streaming, though we had a little trouble getting a Galaxy Note II to push photos and video directly to the connected TV.

Android 4.2 Jelly Bean is running under the hood, with a customized UI to suit the living room environment. An app on your Samsung phone turns it into a wireless keyboard and remote – the display can either be used as a traditional trackpad, or you can physically wave the phone around to move the on-screen mouse cursor – with NFC used to easily pair handset to STB.

From then, you can use screen mirroring, push Full HD content wirelessly through the HomeSync box to your TV, or use local software such as the gallery, video player, and YouTube player. Samsung tells us that you should be able to install any app in the Google Play store too, including Netflix, though we weren’t able to test that since the Netflix app itself wasn’t offered in the regional store the demo hardware was set to.

Up to eight individual user accounts will be supported, each with its own locked-down section of the 1TB drive. Those hunting more local storage will be able to use the USB 3.0 ports to add external drives.

Samsung says the HomeSync will hit the US in April, though is yet to confirm pricing.

In Vodafone’s demo, two screens showed the two perspectives involved: the upper screen would be the TV in the viewer’s home, while the lower display showed what the camera – a simple Logitech webcam – saw and calculated. While facial recognition and tracking is already commonplace, particularly in cameras, Intel’s refinement is to gage attention too: if you’re not actually looking at the screen, instead engrossed in your phone, book, or tablet for instance, it won’t include you in the count of overall viewers.

Initial identification is almost instantaneous, though the system takes a few seconds of prolonged attention in order to identify gender and other details. Once that happens, the box overlaid on the user’s face – which tracks around as the viewer moves in the frame – turns either blue for males or red for females. Meanwhile, other graphics show more specific demographics, such as age bracket, and track historical viewing trends.

Vodafone had a playlist of three commercials for the system to cycle between, and depending on the split of male and female attention, as well as other factors, would choose which to queue up next. For the viewer it’s all seamless: there’s no sudden jump to new content, simply a selection of adverts that they might well be more interested in than the regular network choice.

The system isn’t perfect. We had trouble being recognized while wearing glasses – the camera simply didn’t flag us up as a viewer – and Vodafone told us that people with bald heads could also confuse things, with Intel’s computation unable to figure out gender. As for the inevitable privacy concerns, Intel has already said that it will be fitting a shutter mechanism to its STB, allowing coy subscribers to block off the view of the camera altogether.

Vodafone couldn’t tell us specific details about the Intel system, nor indeed confirm or deny whether this particular implementation would find its way into the eventual Web TV device. Still, this certainly fits in with what the chip company has described. Intel Web TV will launch sometime in 2013.

So says the folks over at CNET, reporting that word was passed down from a “high-level Samsung executive” at the ongoing Mobile World Congress 2013. This isn’t particularly surprising given the manufacturer’s rampant success as the most popular Android handset maker. Sony, on the other hand, has stated that it is in line to launch a Firefox OS device.

The Sony handset is slated for launch in 2014, with the company’s engineers working alongside Mozilla to produce the device. With that competition out of the way, Sony has a better chance of pushing its Firefox OS efforts to become the top maker of devices for the mobile operating system. No information on what the handset will be like is known, however.

Firefox OS will feature the ability to gather search results from both the Web and apps simultaneously, as well as a feature allowing users to create an app from a search term for expedited searches. Mozilla promises that the most beloved apps will be available in the Firefox Marketplace when the devices launch, including Twitter, Facebook, AccuWeather, and more.

[via CNET]

The Wireless Ultra HD Transmission technology works by compressing video for optimized wireless transfer to a corresponding Ultra HD TV, with LG promising very little data loss and lag between the two devices. In order to avoid wonky graphics, the video that is being transferred from the mobile device is automatically set to match the TV’s resolution.

LG’s President and CEO Jong-seok Park had this to say: “Thanks to our innovative Wireless Ultra HD Transmission technology, users can now enjoy their favorite mobile content on today’s most advanced Ultra HD TVs. With the development of this cutting-edge technology, LG again confirms its industry leadership in the area of display and mobile convergence for a truly enjoyable viewing experience.”

In addition, the technology is reported as using up less than 50-percent of the power used by competing technologies. Because of this, the transfer process is easier on the smartphone’s processor and associated hardware. Those who attend MWC 2013 will be able to check out this process is action at LG’s booth in Hall #3.

[via LG Newsroom]

First up is the CAT B15′s specs, which are decidedly mid-range and ample enough for most casual users. Inside, users will find 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage space. There’s a dual-core 1GHz Cortex A9 processor, as well as a 4-inch WVGA resolution (800 x 480). Overall, not too bad, but the hardware definitely isn’t this device’s claim to fame.

As far as its ability to handle the harsh external world, the B15 is constructed from aluminium and shock-absorbing rubber, giving it a sort of built-in protective case appearance. The device can handle drops onto concrete from a height of just under 6 feet. The phone can be submerged in water, as well, up to a depth of a little over 3 feet, meaning you won’t have to panic when it plops into the kiddie pool or rain puddle.

Temperature is also of little worry to the B15, which can handle temps as low as -4F to as high as 122F. Word has it the handset will be available in March, and will be priced at £299, which is a tad over $450USD. There’s no mention of whether the device will be available in retail stores (hardware stores?), or just online.

[via T3]

Samsung is disregarding Firefox OS because it wants to focus a majority of its efforts into developing the Tizen OS for its devices. Firefox OS and Tizen OS are two newbies looking to shake up the mobile world, and with both operating systems being backed by major manufacturers, we will be seeing a new generation of smartphones as well as a more competitive mobile market place.

The Tizen OS is moving along really well in development. The UI looks polished, and developers have just recently received access to the core features in the OS. Samsung’s gearing to launch multiple Tizen devices by the second half of this year. Firefox OS is also looking pretty good, and being HTML5 based, app development for it should be much easier for developers.

Both mobile operating systems look to have a promising future in the market place, and we’ll see how consumers like them compared to the major players, iOS and Android. With Blackberry 10 gaining traction in the market, and Windows Phone 8 going on a marketing frenzy, we should be seeing a very interesting battle of the mobile OS’s soon. What’s your take on these newcomers?

[via CNET]

Duarte’s role at Google has been to coax a more design-led attitude out of product development, something he himself admits that the search giant hasn’t, historically, been great at. He came to the job with good credentials, too, integral in developing webOS – pre-HP acquisition – which, for all its faults, was well regarded for its user-friendly aesthetic.

Most recently, though, Duarte has been integral in refining the Google Now experience, a process which began in an inter-disciplinary meeting back in November 2011 and culminated, in its first iteration at least, at Google I/O in July last year. For those unfamiliar, Google Now turns the “portable computer” nature of smartphones on its head, instead using a powerful contextual engine to suggest information that your Android smartphone believes will be relevant at any one time.

That could include flight details if you have travel coming up in your calendar or Gmail, driving directions to your next appointment (or public transportation guidance if you tell Google Now you’re more likely to use it), weather information, or even just a pedometer summary at the end of the month, showing how many steps you’ve taken while carrying your Android phone. However, the simple suggestions mask an altogether more important change in how Google sees its search results: with greater confidence that its top result is the one you’re probably looking for.

Asked whether Google Now is in grooming to be the new Android homescreen, Duarte told us that he feels “it has the potential to be.” In fact, it’s already the first place he usually begins his smartphone journey. “For me, Google Now is the place I go to all the time, and that’s why it was so important for us not to create a new location to bring assistance, but to go to the place where people were going to start searching the web, or searching their phone, with Google, and make that the place where these assisted cards could appear” he explained. “It’s kind of a new paradigm, and one which I think does speak to the future of this very helpful type of computer interface, as opposed to the current start screens where you have to make all the choices, it’s almost like a computer control panel in a rocket ship where there’s lots of icons you have to punch-punch-punch.”

Google Now differs from traditional search results in that, while it calls upon the same engine, it takes a more definitive stance on presenting an answer. The development team quickly decided that it would need to have a distinct visual identity, separate both from Android and Google on the web, and that the snackable data it gave would have to be pared down rather than a list of blue hyperlinks. That focus on the right answer, not the range of answers, has since been echoed in Google Glass, which shares similar interface dynamics: a small display footprint, intended for at-a-glance consumption, so that it fits into life’s routines rather than demanding full attention.

“[Project Glass] was very exciting, because the design work we did for Google Now kind of served as a really strong touchpoint for some of the design work that happened with the Glass team” Duate told us. “In fact, members of my team collaborated very closely with members of their team in doing that. And the kind of bold, typographic version of Google that is confident about giving you an answer, and confident about giving you the big picture – very different from the old Google – that’s present in Glass, and I find that really satisfying and really exciting.”

Duarte shares a similar obsession with wearables like Glass with many of us, though he told SlashGear he’s yet to try the Pebble smartwatch. But in general the wearables space, I think it’s terrific, because for as long as I remember it I’ve been excited about Android because it is the computing platform for everything” he told us, sticking perhaps a little closely to the company line. “So I’m just waiting for the screens to show up so we can put Android on them, and now we really are starting to see wearable screens, and that’s great.”

However, beyond the expansion of Android, Duarte’s interest in wearables is as a user-experience expert, and in how the growing persistence of data – contextual and otherwise – will affect the way we interact not only with our devices but in social settings. “At a greater level, this question of user’s attention and user’s immersion into technology, I think is something we as designers have a big responsibility to pay attention to” he said. “I think one of the challenges with technology is how we can use it to make our lives better, but actually to be present in the real world while we’re using it, not just sucked into the technology. And part of that is the minor cycle of distraction while you’re using one part of your phone, and the icons for other things can distract you about other parts of your phone.”

“But the challenge that I find even more exciting, is when you’re in a room with people, or when you’re out and about, how do you keep from even getting sucked into the phone, how can we be smarter about when to notify you about things, how can wearable technology allow us to notify you, or immerse you in data, in less intrusive ways?” It’s a question that has been asked on many occasions since the first Project Glass concept video was released: will wearers simply end up interacting with a persistent smartphone in their peripheral vision, losing all contact with the people around them.

As Duarte sees it, part of his responsibility to users – and that of his team at Google – is to “put you in control of when you decide to deal with that online world.” That’s not so simple as cutting out the flow of data altogether, as we usually do when we drop our phones in pockets or bags. Indeed, it’ll require an even greater bond between wearer and device, something into which design plays a hugely significant role.

Duarte actually thinks Glass is already a beautifully designed product, and disagrees with the suggestions of some that the headset needs a redesign in order to be palatable to a more general audience. Still, he concedes that there are more pressing aesthetic questions around wearables than current smartphone technology. “Whenever you bring technology into your personal space, it’s a really hard challenge” Duarte points out. “The challenge of designing phones is almost the same thing, except that for [the Glass team] it’s dialed up to 100.”

Rumors have circulated recently that the Glass team might be working with a US designer to refine the wearable hardware; Duarte wouldn’t comment on that specifically, but he did point out that the development cycle – including aesthetics – is so rapid, what may seem clunky in the first iteration will quickly be refined tomorrow.

“If you look at the devices we have today, it’s amazing how much like jewelry they are. Even four, six years ago, the phones we had – if you go back in time – they’re huge! They’re clunky, they’re plastic, they’re terrible” he told us. “Today, a product like Nexus 4, has kind of the precision and polish and feel of, like, a really beautiful Art Deco cigarette case. And yes it’s functional, but it’s also a fashion accessory. And I think all technology goes through that curve, when you first have something which looks really, y’know, technologically clunky, like the original Motorola StarTACs, and then it becomes something that there is one for everybody, that meets their personal style; just something you fall in love with.”

While Glass is a standalone product – albeit one that can tether to your 3G/4G smartphone for use outside of WiFi coverage – Duarte is confident that tomorrow’s wearables will be more distributed than converged in a single point. Asked whether he would opt for a head-mounted display, like Glass, or a smartwatch, he told us that “”I always pick both when I’m faced with a choice like that” and that we should “embrace the power of ‘and’!”

That’s down to different form-factors still having relevance, even if they only contain a few sensors, or perhaps just one. Google’s advantage in the fledgling market is one of breadth of user-base, the design exec points out, not to mention the not-inconsiderable amount in the bank. “I think the whole realm of wearables is really exciting” he said. “I think one of the cool things about Glass, and the way that Google approaches things, is that we have the scale and the opportunity to do things that are kind of outside the box, and I think there’s a huge range of ways that we can get technology on you that are not obvious.”

“Strapping technology to your wrist is something that we’ve all been used to for, what, hundreds of years now,” he emphasized, “and I think that’s actually really powerful, that’s really cool. But that’s just the beginning.” Research into context, and about delivering relevant results without distractions, are “super-exciting questions” as well as “things we’re going to be doing a lot of work on in the next few years.”

For Google Now, meanwhile, it’s still very much a work-in-progress. Duarte wouldn’t give us any specific examples of where the context engine would go next, but it’s clear that with the amount of work that has gone into Now so-far, it’s likely to play an increasingly central role in future iterations of Android. As Glass reaches the consumer market, meanwhile, later in 2013, that will likely see Now’s brand of confident predictions tested more thoroughly. Users might be less willing to accept misguided results on a mobile device versus in a desktop browser, but they’ll be even less accommodating of poor suggestions floated in their wearable display. The Glass project – and indeed Google Now – are still young, but there’s a lot about the future of Android that rests upon their reception and development.

Sony’s Xperia Z and Tablet Z are getting a lot of buzz among consumers. Both offer beautiful form-factors alongside great specs, making them very appealing to any type of consumer. Both devices are water-resistant, being able to be submerged in water for up to 30 minutes without any detrimental effects. Sony believes that the Xperia Z and Tablet Z will help make it a major competitor in the Android space.

With the Xperia Z and Tablet Z fighting its Android wars for it, Sony hopes that it can also create devices that will make it the top manufacturer of mobile devices for the Firefox OS. Samsung will not be throwing its hat in the Firefox OS ring because it wants to focus all of its efforts on the Tizen OS. With Samsung out of the way, Sony has a really good chance of dominating the Firefox OS space, with its only real competitor being LG.

Firefox OS looks like it will have a very promising future, especially with all of these great backers. Mozilla says that the Firefox OS will have a great app base, with many popular apps like Facebook and Twitter already available for the platform. Because of the HTML5 platform, it will also be easier for web developers to create apps for the OS. Mozilla promises that the Firefox OS devices will have affordable price tags, making them even more appealing in the eyes of the consumers.

[via The Next Web]

Samsung began a revolution with NFC when it launched devices capable of S-Beam. Now it plans on taking it a step forward by enabling NFC mobile payments with its future devices. It will load the Visa payWave application on all of its future devices, which will allow consumers to “wave and pay” for their transactions. Dr. Won-Pyo Hong, president and head of the Media Solution Center at Samsung Electronics, said, “Samsung has been a pioneer in NFC devices and is again leading the way in enabling NFC-based mobile payments. The partnership with Visa represents a step towards a global mobile payment platform.”

Alongside Samsung’s devices being able to make NFC mobile payments, Samsung will also allow banks to be able to load personal account information onto Samsung’s devices over-the-air. The transfer of information will be secured by a security chip inside of Samsung’s devices that utilizes the Visa Mobile Provisioning Service linked to Samsung’s Key Management System.

ABI Research believes that 1.95 billion devices will be NFC-enabled by the year 2017. Samsung wants to be the jump-starter that makes NFC-mobile payments commonplace. With it’s huge market share, and large number of loyal followers, Samsung is one of the best candidates to popularize NFC-payments in countries like the United States.

[via Business Wire]

Tizen development has come along pretty well. It was only a week ago when the Tizen SDK 2.0 was released to developers. The SDK showed us how Tizen is looking so far, and it’s looking pretty polished. Developers are now given access to more core aspects of the OS to work on.

Tizen SDK 2.1 should be available for developers around Q2 2013 enabling more features for developers to work upon. Tizen looks like it’s on the right track for a release this year. We already know that Samsung plans on releasing multiple devices running the Tizen OS this year in order for it to lessen its dependence upon Google.

With Samsung’s support, Tizen could be a big deal. Many people already associate the Android name with Samsung’s Galaxy line-up and it’s getting to the point where the average consumer is having a hard time differentiating the two. With Samsung’s marketing and their name behind the product, Tizen could definitely be a new, major competitor in the mobile OS crowd. We also can’t forget that Firefox will be launching it’s own mobile OS, Firefox OS, this year as well. We’ll see if the newbies stand a chance against the likes of iOS and Android.

[via The Verge]

At the bottom of this holder you’ll notice a little space, this being open so that your smartphone’s microUSB can be accessed for a more traditional charging experience. Of course your device will need to have a centered microUSB port for this to happen, but still – that’s rather nice of them to think of this, yes? Charging power comes from a lighter plug that’s also got an extra USB port on its back – from there you’ll be able to output power galore once more.

This device is made for the Lumia lineup and will be sold with Nokia device in mind, and you’ll want to head to the store to test it out before you assume it’ll work perfectly with your wireless charging-capable device. If you only want it for NFC and the port at the bottom for ease in holding whilst charging, you’re in luck! Unfortunately there are not details regarding pricing or a release date as of yet – you’ll just have to wait!

You can find a whole lot more Nokia news from this week in our lovely Nokia tag portal right this minute if you like. You should also head straight into our Mobile World Congress 2013 portal while you’re at it – we’ll be here through the rest of the week as well!

Speaking this week on the topic of Vertical Disruption in the mobile industry, Jacobs made it clear that “disruption” was too negative to be comfortable to go forth with. Instead it was Mobile Enablement that Jacobs decided to focus on. Qualcomm’s vision of a Digital 6th Sense was re-outlined as a user interface for the world – for the things in your life that don’t otherwise have one.

With this Digital 6th Sense comes the new concept Qualcomm first spoke about earlier today – The Internet of Everything. The AllJoyn collection of connectivity technology – an update for which was also announced today – is at the heart of Qualcomm’s push for a connected world. For the world where an Internet of Everything is made real.

As far as disruption goes, Jacobs reminded the audience that smartphone shipments were twice the number of PC shipments through 2012 (according to a Gartner study published earlier this month). It’s through this wireless world that we connect – this is Qualcomm’s message.

Both healthcare and education were spoken about as two of the most important areas for innovation that Qualcomm is working with. The technology for the enablement of services created by the open source community to boost the abilities of educators, students, doctors, and everyday citizens – all comes through AllJoyn through the future.

Stay tuned the rest of this week in our fabulous Mobile World Congress 2013 tag portal for more information on Qualcomm and the rest of the wireless universe from across the planet. You’ll find more up to the minute news action and hands-on experiences than you can throw a stick at!

That works out to a screen that, although decent at first glance, simply lacks the rich pixel density of its Full HD rivals. Given the sheer size of the phone suggests it’s a media-centric device, that seems an odd choice to us.

ZTE Grand Memo hands-on video:

Elsewhere, though, things get somewhat better. The main camera runs at 13-megapixels – though it’s paired with a mere 1-megapixel front camera, where other devices might often have 2-megapixels or more – and has a 3,200 mAh battery to keep the big display running. You also get WiFi a/b/g/n (2.4/5GHz) and Bluetooth 4.0 LE, as well as LTE.

There’s no denying it’s an odd beast, though. The processor and 13-megapixel camera are top-tier, but the screen resolution smacks of older technology and the build quality is a dire symphony in cheap plastic.

ZTE could redeem itself somewhat if the pricing is right, though the company isn’t talking figures yet. We’ll know soon enough, when the Grand Memo hits China in March and then rolls on to a European launch.

The “4S” concept spoken about this week by ZTE doesn’t necessarily mean that the company will be moving forward with devices with a “4S” in the name, but that their aim in the market will be living by those four pillars of strength. With the ZTE Grand Memo, the team employs – first of all – ZTE Assistant with power savings and Security.

Next you’ll find ZTE Drive for Safety – you’ll never be lost with this ZTE-branded navigation system. For Sound you’ve got Dolby Digital Plus technology – blasting forth from the device’s back-facing speaker. ZTE continues their dedication to creating amazing products with a first-ever integration of Qualcomm’s most powerful mobile processor.

With this integration, ZTE becomes the sole manufacturer with an announcement out of a device with such a set of powerful innards. This along with the device’s own unique user interface Mi•Pop over Android will create not just a great experience for the user, but one they’ll not find anywhere else.

Have a peek at the timeline below to see other recent Qualcomm Snapdragon-related posts from the recent past and have a tap with the ZTE tag portal for more information on the releases of this OeM this week. Also be sure to follow along with SlashGear this whole week with the Mobile World Congress 2013 tag portal for more hands-on and up to the minute news action than you can handle!

The Grand Memo also rocks a Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 800 quad-core CPU, which clocks in at 1.5GHz with 1GB of RAM, and it marks the first time that Qualcomm’s new 800 processor is being used. The device also has a 13MP rear camera and 16GB of internal storage with Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean running on board. Overall, the specs look pretty good here, other than the slight lack of ample storage space.

What makes the Grand Memo unique, however, is how you unlock the device when you start it up. You either tap and hold on the screen for a few second, or you can do a pinch-out gesture that brings up a few shortcuts, like the phone, calendar, camera, etc. And of course, ZTE put their own little spin on the Android interface.

The Grand Memo will be launching in China sometime next March, with a European release coming sometime “later this year.” Unfortunately, there’s no word yet of pricing details, and as to whether or not you’ll see this device in the US, we’d have to say there’s a slim chance of that happening, so you’ll be sticking with your Galaxy Note II for the time being.

The FonePad actually isn’t your typical 7-inch tablet, however. If the name of the slate gave you any hints, then you might know that this tablet acts as a phone as well, earpiece and all. The 7-inch display as an HD 1280×800 resolution, and there’s a front-facing camera that shoots 1.2MP worth of photos and videos.

There are two iterations of this device at least (beyond color combinations), one with a rear camera, the other without. At the moment we’re not quite sure if both versions will arrive on the scene on the same time or if their release will be separated by region. Colors and internal storage sizes are also a bit up for grabs, as it were.

The FonePad is powered by Intel’s Atom Z2420 processor clocked at 1.2GHz with 1GB of RAM. As far as graphics are concerned, you’ll be working with a PowerVR GX540 GPU unit. The tablet has 16GB of internal storage, but thanks to a microSD card slot, you can bump that spec up to another 32GB if need be.

The tablet comes with everything you’ll need to make that occasional phone call, including the necessary radios and the SIM card slot. It will be arriving in the UK sometime between April and June, at a price of £179, or 219 euros in Europe, and it’ll reach the Asia-Pacific region around the same timeframe for $249. However, there’s no word on a US release, but we have a feeling the slate might make its way stateside at some point.

MasterPass will support NFC, QR codes, and tags on a number of mobile devices at the checkout line in stores. Whereas MasterCard’s PayPass only supported NFC, thus restricting many mobile devices that don’t have NFC from using the service. However, with this MasterPass extension, more mobile devices can join in on the fun using other forms of communication.

MasterPass also includes new functionality that allows shoppers to scan a product barcode while in the store aisle and make the purchase right there within the store’s app. Banks, merchants, and partners can offer their own branded wallets in the MasterPass app as well, and they will include cards other than MasterCard.

Of course, this is essentially MasterCard’s answer to Google’s Wallet service and PayPal. The ability to display QR codes makes it easier for more smartphones to act as a digital wallet, even devices that don’t have NFC on board. MasterPass is expected to launch sometime next month in Australia and Canada, with launches in the US and UK following shortly after.

With the ASUS Padfone you’ve got two devices in one – the phone is meant to be the main focus here while the tablet stays behind most of the time. When you’re at home and want a larger display to play games on, browse the web, or watch movies, all you’ve got to do is plug it in. The Padfone dock is also a full-fledged 10.1-inch tablet – but only when you’ve got the smartphone docked.

You’ll get a full Android 4.x Jelly Bean experience right out of the box, ASUS own connection to cloud services galore, and one of the fastest processors on the planet. With the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor (1.6Ghz of it) you’ll be rocking and rolling as fast and as beastly as you would on the HTC One – but here you’re getting a totally different form factor. And that’s just for starters.

With the Padfone you’ve also got a Full HD display at 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution – that’s 441 PPI and, as ASUS has made clear several times during their press conference, “much better than the [Apple] Retina display.” You’ll be working with a 13 megapixel camera on the backs of both of these devices, each of them f/2.0 five-element lenses to boot.

Have a peek at the hands-on presentation above and below and get pumped up for a much more in-depth look at this device as we get closer to a final release. We’ll be seeing this device appear on the market for 999 Euro by March of 2013 – and though we’ve only seen China as a market thus far, we can expect this machine to expand internationally soon thereafter. Take a peek at our Mobile World Congress 2013 portal for more information on the universe of interconnectivity all this next week!

You’ve got a 1280 x 800 pixel display, an Intel Atom Z2420 processor under the hood, and a rather sleek look. The Fonepad is 340g heavy – rather light, that is, and works with an ultra-thin 10.4mm profile. Compared to the Nexus 7, that’s positively on a diet. You’ll find that the Fonepad’s 10-point touchcreen up front is ready for awesome gaming action along with IPS LCD technology for ultra-bright pictures and video.

Inside you’ve got 3G and HSPA+ connectivity if you like – and there’s another model coming out in a wifi-only configuration that we’ve not year heard pricing on. And then there’s the pricing on the 3G version – $249 USD! That’s the estimate the group has given us at the moment – we’ll see if it holds strong through the future. Could this be a rather strange Nexus 4 competitor at that price off-contract?

You’ll also find both 8GB and 16GB iterations for this device – internal storage, that is, and you’ve got an SD card slot for memory expansion up to 32GB. This device offers 5GB free ASUS WebStorage for life, and will be ready for some aoCloud action in the near future as well – more on that in the ASUS tag portal here on SlashGear if you’d like.

Have a peek at the MWC 2013 tag portal and stick with us all week long for more up to the minute news and hands-on action!

The Padfone Inifinity Station works with a 10.1-inch Full HD tis plat as well, with a 1920 x 1280 pixel resolution. This device has a 13 megapixel camera on the back, 2 megapixels up front with an f2.0 aperture on both sides. You’ll get 100 shots out of the back at 8fps – wild!

Customer Happiness 2.0 is the new way ASUS is pushing this device – or these devices, as it were. This device is the epitome of what ASUS is pushing as a dual-purpose device, and a connected world. You’ll have everything you need, too, with ASUS’ own aoCloud, also revealed this week. This software allows cloud-stored media able to be accessed on any device – even non-ASUS devices, mind you. The phone works with an NFC antenna made up of the Padfone logo – an oddity to be sure.

You’ll also get a massively powerful quad-core 1.6Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor under the hood. This is such a big deal that this device gets this processor at this point in the year that Qualcomm’s own CEO Paul Jacobs stepped on the stage at Mobile World Congress to talk it up. He was joined on stage by the CEO of China Unicom as well, they being one of the first – if not the first – to be onboard with carrying the device in the wild.

You’ll also get 2GB DRAM, 64GB Flash Storage, and 4G LTE connectivity. Also included with your purchase of this device is 64GB of cloud storage with ASUS’ own cloud services.

The Padfone Infinity is made to bring ASUS’ own Audio Wizard to the forefront as well. This is a bit of software made to optimize your sound based on the type of media you’re working with. You’ll be choosing how you want everything to sound – at it’s base, this is a set of pre-made levels. This device also has ASUS-guaranteed excellent sound from this device’s speakers as well – all 18mm of them on the tablet bit of this equation.

And all of this will be available for 999 Euro. That means it’ll be just a bit more than $1,000 in the USA – sound alright to you?

Meanwhile stay tuned with SlashGear for Mobile World Congress 2013 through our massive MWC 2013 tag portal. We’ll be here all week long!