MWC 2013

If this year's Mobile World Congress taught us one thing, it's that no matter how interesting and innovative the gadget makers and software developers of our global community are, it's the top brands that end up making or breaking the show. Make or break the show for the press, that is. Case in point: our several articles written from our chat with Google's Mathias Duarte - they ended up easily becoming some of the most popular posts we had this week, and Google didn't reveal any new products at the convention. In fact, they didn't have a stand - the chat we had wasn't even on the map. And yet, there it is - Google stole the show anyway.

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This week at Mobile World Congress 2013 we've seen Nokia's own Lumia 820 and 520 getting their own custom casings (not just covers, that is) with the MakerBot Replicator 2 - live and in-action! While it was just this January when Nokia first released their own 3D case printing files for the Lumia 820, MakerBot quickly revealed their own MakerBot Replicator 2 Destkop 3D Printer optimized shell that Nokia uses this week. This ultimate team-up showed what it could do with the publicly available files - all you need is your own maker to make your own!

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Mobile World Congress 2013 scrambles to a close, a week of new phones and tablets, a shiny new venue, and more questions as to whether the days of the big trade show are numbered. It's been a show where the divisions between the mobile upstarts and the current key players have been sharply defined, with ZTE, Huawei, and Nokia all pushing to corner the market, while Samsung and HTC were notable by their relative absence of announcements, favoring their own, standalone events. Nevertheless, there's plenty to wrap up, and seldom has a headline been so accurate in so many ways.

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Are wearables like Google Glass the inevitable future for smartphones? Not if you ask Nokia, where simply floating a display in your line of sight doesn't quite satisfy the self-imposed "head up" challenge its designers and engineers are facing. The evolution of Lumia isn't just bigger displays or faster chips, it's a new way of interacting with the digital world. SlashGear sat down with Jo Harlow, EVP of Smart Devices, Marco Ahtisaari, EVP of Design, and Stefan Pannenbecker, VP of Industrial Design at Mobile World Congress this week to talk "people versus robots", rolling back the clock on convergence, and how the Finns want to pry our eyes away from smartphone screens, even if we're looking at a Lumia.

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Nokia may not have ruled out a QWERTY Windows Phone for its portfolio, but the chances of a device with a physical keyboard are shrinking, according to smartphone chief Jo Harlow. Speaking to SlashGear at Mobile World Congress this week, where Nokia took its Windows Phone 8 range to five devices with the addition of the Lumia 520 and Lumia 720, Harlow admitted that the company's reluctance to revisit physical text entry options was down to a fear of being left on the wrong side of the mobile industry's momentum - again.

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Android and Chrome OS: Google's split attention between two overlapping platforms has long come in for criticism, but rumors of a merge in time for the Chromebook Pixel failed to pan out. Then again, is the world ready for a $1,300 Chromebook, no matter whether it runs Android or Chrome OS? Perhaps not, Google's director of Android user experience, Matias Duarte, says, but there's more in Pixel's prescience of the touchscreen future, he argues.

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LG announced what they call the "world's smallest" wireless charger for smartphones here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We ended up getting a peak at the new accessory just to see how small it really is. The result? It's not necessarily tiny by any means, but it does shave off a few centimeters compared to other wireless charging devices.

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During a speech today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said that over 1 billion files are being uploaded to the cloud storage service every day. The CEO also said that its 100 million users are accessing their Dropbox accounts on a combined 500 million mobile devices. The company expects to reach 150 million users by the end of the year.

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During a developer conference at Mobile World Congress today, Samsung announced Wallet, an Apple Passbook-style ticket and coupon management app that looks to compete against Apple's own offering. Samsung has already launched the open API to the app, and the tool will allow users to save tickets, boarding passes, coupons, and other paperwork to a central hub on their mobile devices.

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This week the folks at WildTangent have revealed that they've worked with Sony Mobile Communications to release their game rental service for Xperia smartphones such as the Sony Xperia Z, this continuing their team-up into the future. Back in September of 2011, WildTangent high-fived Sony and began to partner with them in both desktop and mobile products. You'll find WildTangent pre-installed on VAIO PCs as well as Sony Tablets S and P in Europe already - and the fun continues!

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Android on every display, on every device, baked into every gadget: it may sound far-fetched, but it's user-experience chief Matias Duarte's vision of the future for an "operating system for humanity." SlashGear sat down with Duarte to talk ubiquity of platform, Android's potential as the solution to a "fractured operating system world", and the importance of that being open rather than led by Apple, Microsoft, or any government or organization.

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If you've ever used a "rugged" smartphone or tablet before, you'll be surprised to hear that the newest of these rare unicorns is not slow and stunted like those of the past have been - instead the CAT B15 is a rather well balanced device. We've had a peek at the B15 from CAT (or Caterpillar, however you like), and found it to be both obviously able to withstand a beating and appearing to run as quick in its Android implementation as we'd expect a 2013 device to be.

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