MWC 2026 Day 3: Taking Your Robots Outside

Day three is my last day at MWC 2026, which is an improvement over last year when I only stepped onto the show floor twice. I was able to take in quite a few smartphones this year compared to last, which was a nice change of pace for...you know...Mobile World Congress. But now my time in Barcelona has come and gone, and before I hit the road (again? Still?) I wanted to talk about the last few cool items I found at MWC.

For my last day, I ran the gamut of tech, and the (entirely accidental) theme for the day was taking tech outside or at least pretending to do so — you'll see what I mean in a minute. From there, I headed outside myself to hail a cab and head for the airport. So, with my third and final day of MWC in the books, here's what I saw.

I've been talking to Xgimi for a few months now about their MemoMind One smart glasses, but I had yet to try a demo. That stems mostly from a rule I have of not putting things on my face that have been on hundreds of other faces. Today at MWC, I showed up early and tried a demo since at least I was the first face of the day. Overall, I came away cautiously optimistic. These could be a compelling offering in the smart glasses space. They have monochrome screens built into the lenses that are driven by tiny projectors. Since Xgimi is a projector company at heart, this was a natural fit.

My demo took me through a few of the functions, including a question-and-answer session with an AI, calendar and notifications, a teleprompter mode, and a real-time (ish) translator. All of the functions worked pretty well, I'm happy to report. The glasses also have speakers built into them that sound okay, but I wasn't able to request the normal selection of songs I would have liked.

The glasses should be launched in the April time frame at $599, which feels steep for the limited functionality that I experienced. It seems like there are more features coming down the pipe, but for now, I didn't feel like $600 would be a great investment. They still need a little more time to cook. Fortunately, most of the shortcomings are software-related, so there's definitely room to grow.

SunLED is a company showcasing a device that aims to help you feel better, even, and especially if you're stuck behind a desk all day. The company was co-founded by Dr. Anne Berends, who was on-site to talk about the technology. Here's the gist of it.

When you stay inside all day, you miss out on some important qualities that sunlight imbues your body with. Many of us work for a living, so it's not like we have much of a choice, so Dr. Berends developed tech to feed you those near-UV rays directly using a device that looks a lot like a webcam. Throughout the day, the device shines invisible light onto you that will help you be invigorated. If that sounds a little snake oil-ish, I agree, so I asked about it.

The company has submitted scientific, double-blind studies featuring self-identifying characteristics and moods. Some people got the real thing, some got nothing, and some got a placebo. Users self-reported being in a better mood, and body metrics such as resting heart rate were reduced. All that seems to lend credence to the idea that this can be helpful. It's not a cure-all for everything that ails you, but if you can't get outside more, perhaps you can bring more of the outside in.

Oukitel is always fun for a visit at MWC because this company makes huge, and mostly ridiculous phones with gigantic batteries and features you would never think to put into them. This year was not disappointing. The Oukitel WP63 comes with the usual stuff that's ridiculous in a phone — a 20,000 mAh battery, a huge signal light, massive loudspeaker, and a terrible processor you would only wish on someone who kicked your dog. If that's where Oukitel stopped, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. But Oukitel didn't stop there.

This phone — this smartphone built in the year of our Lord 2026 — has a fire starter/ignitor built into it. You read that correctly. This phone can start fires, intentionally and on purpose. At the top of the phone, a little ignitor pops out and heats up (it's controlled by an app) until it can set fire to your tinder, or your cigarette, or your house if you need the insurance money. All of those things are on the table.

Obviously, this device is meant for outdoorsy, survivalist people who need this kind of thing around. I can't imagine an average office worker hopping onto the train to head downtown to their office job with this phone in their pocket, but I won't judge. So if you're headed off the grid, but for some reason you still want a phone, and you want that phone to light your campfire, boy, do I have good news for you.

I did not have "talk to three different satellite companies" on my MWC bingo card, but here we are. I first got interested in satellite-to-phone technology back in 2023, when I went to see it demonstrated by Qualcomm. Since then, a few other companies, including Apple and Google, have launched their own capabilities, and until now, it has always felt like a half-measure or a workaround.

Having talked to companies like Skylo, Viasat, and AT&T, I feel like we might be on the verge of a revolution in technology. I can't speak directly about what they told me — much of it was theory, and other stuff was 100% off the record, but I learned a few interesting tidbits that I can share. First, your phone can probably already talk to satellites, meaning that it probably has the capability of doing so. The feature may not be activated, and there may be no service to enable it — yet — but the technology is there, and it's possible. Like setting up a terrestrial network, there are things to consider, such as spectrum and bandwidth that have to be dealt with, but for the most part, the capability is there.

Moreover, the capability might be coming sooner than you think. I don't want to sound overly vague, but the conversations I had with these companies were very encouraging. As I noted back in 2023, 85% of the world has limited or no connectivity whatsoever, so there is a definite gap to be filled, and these companies seem to be pretty close to providing a real solution in the not-too-distant future. This will be an interesting space to watch.

Qualcomm unveiled its new processor designed for wearables — the Snapdragon Wear Elite. Like its larger siblings, Snapdragon Wear Elite is a processor built on a 3nm process, making it extremely fast and power-efficient. It also has a built-in NPU for processing AI with up to two billion parameters.

This enables a device like a watch or an AI pin to process its own AI models on the device, making them faster and more efficient. This should also dramatically help with battery life, as the Wear Elite is extremely efficient. It utilizes a big.LITTLE core infrastructure with a 2.1 GHz main core and four other 1.95 GHz cores for taking over easier tasks.

Both Samsung and Google have signed on to use the Snapdragon Wear Elite processor in upcoming wearables. That could include the next Galaxy and Pixel watch, among other things. Wearables are becoming more and more of a thing in our future, and this processor could help define their capabilities in a big way.

Finally, if you're headed outside and you want to get some work done, there's the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro. This is Xiaomi's latest flagship tablet, and I've been reviewing it for a few weeks now. Put simply, it's pretty great. It has an 11.2-inch 3.2K display that is just gorgeous, and a 144Hz refresh rate. It's powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor. It only has 8GB or 12GB of RAM on board, but given the RAM shortage, I suppose that can be forgiven #ThanksAI.

The tablet was also shipped to me with the Pro magnetic keyboard, which is very much an Apple Magic Keyboard clone. The keyboard itself is wonderful for typing and has a decently large trackpad. This is the mystery tablet I brought along with my MSI Prestige 13 laptop to MWC, and it has worked exactly as intended. It's a great portable writing and content consumption machine if you need one.

Finally, while this device won't help you outside — or anywhere yet, since it remains a somewhat elusive concept — is the Honor robot phone. I got a preview of this device at CES a couple of months ago, but that was a non-working demo. Now, I got to see a working demo, but I still wasn't allowed to hold it. A colleague said, "Until I get to hold it, it's vaporware," which is a fair assessment, but given the demos I saw, this ranks a bit higher on the scale toward being a real product.

The gist of the device is that it's a camera on a gimbal, and that comes with all the obvious benefits. Super steady camera shooting and the ability to aim the camera anywhere are the obvious ones. Honor went further, though, by adding some personality to the device. The gimbal can move and shake to music or look at you when you react with the onboard AI. Neither of those things requires the other — you can have a gimbal that doesn't dance, and you can have an onboard AI that can play music without dancing. The combination is cute, but I'm not 100% sure it's necessary. All the same, this is a phone that exists for the moment and will probably launch soon-ish, so we're going to run with it.