The Mobile World Congress 2022 Themes to Watch

Looking back at final month'southward Mobile World Congress, here are a dozen trends that stood out, which I call back will bear on the mobile marketplace in the year to come.

1. 5G Is Coming.
To me 5G was the nearly interesting story of the show. Information technology seemed similar every carrier and every major infrastructure provider is trying to roll this out as fast as possible. Speed will exist much faster with 5G of course, but the real focus is to use more spectrum and more than antennas to ensure that more people and more devices can connect at always more affordable prices. Hither'south my have on this.

Of course, there was also a lot of talk about building the infrastructure that telecommunications vendors and carriers need, with companies such equally Ericsson, Nokia, and Huawei talking up their services. Talk of software-defined networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) was everywhere. I liked Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins' formulation that we are "moving from data centers to remove centers of information" with more and more processing taking place at the edge.

2. Mobile Chips Are Getting Faster, Much Faster.
The phones that drew the virtually attending at the evidence were based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, which was announced a twelvemonth ago, but actually took center stage this year. In that location were a number of announcements of new fries leading up to the show, including the Samsung Exynos 8890 and the MediaTek Helio X20. These fries, led by the 820, not only have faster and more efficient CPUs, simply likewise offer significantly better graphics and faster networking.

Perhaps the biggest chip proclamation of the testify was the MediaTek Helio P20, which seems destined for a diversity of mid-range phones in the yr to come. I hope to be posting a larger analysis of the scrap announcements before long.

iii. Virtual and Augmented Reality Are Very Hot.

In some ways, this was the more surprising big tendency of the prove, with all sorts of booths showing VR or AR content.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pretty much stole the show at Samsung's Galaxy S7 press conference, popping up on stage when about of the audience was wearing the Gear VR. He joined Samsung mobile communications president DJ Koh in pushing the concept of affordable VR, given that the Gear VR, which combines Samsung hardware and Facebook Oculus software, is but $99. (Facebook's Oculus division is pushing a much more expensive approach with the Rift VR, which costs $600 on its ain or $1,500 and up when bundled with a compatible PC.)

Lots of other vendors introduced VR or at to the lowest degree 360-degree products likewise. Samsung showed off its Gear 360 photographic camera, a spherical, dual-lens camera about the size of a tennis brawl.

LG showed its own LG 360 Cam, a somewhat smaller device with ii xiii-megapixel cameras. It reminded me a fleck of the Ricoh Theta S. LG also announced the 360 VR, a new lightweight set of goggles that connects to the G5 via a USB-C cablevision. It is significantly lighter than the Gear VR, and I plant it easier to wearable.

Meanwhile, HTC was pushing its own HTC Vibe VR headset, which looked quite skillful.

There were ways to endeavor out VR nearly everywhere y'all looked. Samsung offered a VR roller coaster, while SK Telecom one booth over had a VR submarine. The lines for both lasted throughout the bear witness.

In augmented reality, the virtually impressive product I saw was the tertiary generation of Epson'due south Moverio smart glasses, known as the BT-300. These glasses are 20 percent lighter than the previous generation and include a quad-cadre Atom x5 processor, an OLED projector, and Android v.i. An impressive demo showed it controlling a DJI drone, which has a large advantage over the current system of decision-making a drone from a smartphone, which requires removing your eyes from the drone. With the Moverio spectacles, y'all can come across both the application and the drone at the aforementioned fourth dimension.

On the component level, I was intrigued past some of the new glasses and projectors for AR I saw at CES earlier this twelvemonth; at MWC, I was impressed by Zeiss's Smart Optics project that features a very small projector, so AR glasses tin can wait much more like standard spectacles.

I was interested in a number of 3D sound demos for virtual reality. For case, German enquiry institute Fraunhofer was showing a 3D audio workflow and talking nigh how its Cingo audio-rendering system is being used in both the Samsung Gear VR and the LG 360 VR.

iv. IoT May Be Overhyped, But It is Real.
I'thou skeptical of all of the churr about the Internet of Things (IoT), considering so many of the companies talking most it are suggesting this is an entirely new idea, when in fact we've had things like industrial automation and smart domicile products for years. I tend to await askance at claims this will remake the economy, but I certainly see the benefits to adding sensors and connectivity to all sorts of devices.

At the show, IoT demos were everywhere, with both a big number of smart devices, new sensors, and modems designed to hook these products up. In particular, at that place was a lot of talk virtually low-power wide surface area (LPWA) LTE, such as the existing Category one, and upcoming standard like Category M, which uses a 1 MHz channel and NB-IoT, a narrowband solution designed to utilise only 200 KHz of spectrum. The idea is that this will be ideal for devices that transmit very small amounts of data, mayhap infrequently, so that battery-powered devices tin can concluding for years. Altair and Sequans seem to exist the leaders in depression-power LTE, though other vendors are joining this space.

Many of the IoT examples are compelling. Nosotros heard a lot about monitoring industrial equipment and being able to better practice things similar predictive maintenance. I spent some time talking with John Deere'due south Ron Zink, who explained about putting sensors on combines to measure the spread and results of seeding, working to improve crop yields. With the growing population and country changes, we'll need to double food output in the adjacent 35 years, and he said that John Deere sees the use of sensors, applications, and cloud services as an essential part of making that happen.

5. Mobile Apps Are the Adjacent Big Challenge.

Nearly every visitor I talk to now provides mobile mail and a few corporate applications to their users, typically using one of the enterprise mobile direction (EMM) or mobile device management (MDM) suites. Getting applications to work with all of the suites has been a challenge, and in some ways the bigger claiming is getting custom corporate applications gear up for the mobile globe.

At the show, I was pleased to run across iv of the big EMM vendors—vmWare'southward AirWatch, IBM's MaaS360, MobileIron, and JAMF Software—getting together to ascertain a mutual prepare of standards for deploying and configuring mobile apps for enterprise apply. Called AppConfig, this addresses the problem of each application needing to exist customized for each of the EMM vendors, while using a gear up of open source frameworks and XML. Several of the big EMM players were absent—notably BlackBerry/Adept, Citrix, and Microsoft—but this seems similar a big step in the right direction.

In another coming together, BlackBerry executives said they are aware of AppConfig, maxim the concept was solid but that they had to look at the details to make certain it was as elementary equally it needed to be.

In addition, in that location were a number of tools for creating mobile applications. IBM showed off a number of iOS applications information technology helped customers build as part of its MobileFirst for iOS initiative with Apple, including applications for customer back up and for field service technicians. IBM made a big push with cloud services using Apple'due south Swift language.

Adobe showed off a new tool, Adobe Experience Manager Mobile, designed to assistance enterprises build and manage mobile applications integrated with existing digital publishing tools and marketing materials. This is really aimed at marketers inside large enterprises and should brand information technology easier to track engagement and run analytics, while keeping mobile applications up to date. In that location are enough of other mobile development and analytics tools too, but this sounded especially well suited to large marketing departments.

vi. High-End Phones Struggle For Differentiation.
There were a lot of great flagship phones, led past the Galaxy S7 and the LG G5. But phones from Sony, Huawei, Xiaomi, and LeEco too feature fast processors, great displays, and amazing cameras, making differentiation harder than ever. Here'due south my take on this.

7. Mid-Range Phones Are Better Than Ever.
I'm amazed at the quality of $200 to $300 phones. These all involve some tradeoffs when compared to the high-end phones, only for a reasonable corporeality of coin, you tin can go a midrange phone that blows away anything from three years agone. Hither'due south my take on these.

8. Unusual Phones Still Exist.
While most phones await very much akin, in that location remain a few that have unique features. One of the most interesting I saw was the Cat S60. It stands out past including a FLIR thermal imaging camera next to a regular 13-megapixel camera on the dorsum of the telephone. It's quite interesting to meet a heat map of the room around me. I can imagine information technology for things similar searching for leaks or drafts, particularly in industrial uses. It's pretty smashing.

9. Are Phones the New PCs?
The concept of a telephone acting every bit your PC isn't a new one—Motorola fabricated a big deal of it with the Atrix five years back—but information technology seems to exist gaining more than steam with the Windows 10 "Continuum" feature giving a Windows Phone a more than desktop-like user interface when you lot plug information technology into a keyboard and monitor.

Microsoft debuted this concept with the Lumia 950 line, and I saw a number of demos working with detail keyboards and monitors.

At the testify, HP announced its intention to get into this market place this summer with a high-cease phone that supports the feature: the HP Elite X3, which features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor and a 6-inch, 2,560-by-one,440 display. HP has a dock with DisplayPort, Ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports and a single USB-C port, which you lot can use to make the telephone piece of work more like a desktop by plugging in a mouse and display.

More than impressive was the Mobile Extender, which looks like a 12.5-inch laptop, with a screen, keyboard, and battery, but no processor or retention. Connect it to the Elite X3 wirelessly or by cablevision, and you tin can use information technology equally if it was a notebook, though still using the "phablet" for processing, storage, and networking.

Analogix Semiconductor was showing off its NANO·CONSOLE, a dock for connecting Android or Windows phones or tablets to a Telly via a USB connection. The visitor has been pushing its SlimPort concept of DisplayPort over USB, and now has a version that works with USB-C.

x. Tablets Are Doing Double Duty as Projectors.
The concept of Android tablets that tin can double every bit projectors seems to be coming forth nicely. I liked the concept of Lenovo'due south Yoga Tab iii Pro with its built-in projector, which was function of Last Gadget Standing at CES.

At MWC, I saw a couple of other entries with some unique features, like ZTE's Spro Plus, an 8.4-inch Android tablet with a 500-lumen laser projector built in. I was impressed by simply how bright information technology was. I too saw the Akyumen Falcon G Convertible Projector, a quite sparse tablet that tin run either Android or Windows 10 with an Intel Cherry Trail Cantlet x5-8300 processor and a 45-lumen projector. The idea is absurd, particularly for salespeople who oft travel and have to make presentations.

11. Fast Charging May Be On the Horizon.
Lots of companies are working on much faster charging, with Qualcomm's Quick Charge three.0 at present part of its Snapdragon 820 platform and in a number of phones. Typically, with such features you tin can charge a device to almost fourscore pct in half an hour or so.

Simply I saw a number of demos of much faster charging.

Oppo'due south Super VOOC uses a low-voltage pulse-accuse system. It allows users to charge a phone with a ii,500 mAh bombardment up to 45 percent in 5 minutes, and fully charge in 15 minutes. The company says this is functional on prototype devices.

Even ameliorate, StoreDot showed me a demo of a modified Samsung Galaxy S6 with its new lithium ion battery going from 10 percent to 100 percent in a little more than 5 minus with a special high-power connector, which is pretty spectacular. With a more standard USB connector, this would take a chip longer, but it would still be much faster than today'south solutions. More importantly, the visitor says its engineering allows quick charging without degrading the lifecycle of the battery.

There's apparently work to be done to make these advances available in commercial phones, but StoreDot seems confident this kind of technology can exist on phones in the next yr or two.

12. The PC Still Matters.
I was pleasantly surprised to come across a number of new PCs at the prove, with a detail emphasis on 2-in-1s or convertible PCs. I wasn't expecting this at Mobile World Congress, but was glad to come across it.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.