Mobile World Congress 2012 – A Preview

February 2012 – and Barcelona is becoming the hub of the mobile world again. The Mobile World Congress (MWC) or “Fiesta de los Móviles” like the locals call it will take place from February 27th – March 1st. After the congress moved from Cannes, France to Barcelona in Spain it has become the Nr. 1 congress for (mobile) telecommunication at least in Europe – but probably worldwide (since CES is on its way down anyways). And for Northern Europeans it’s the first relief of the cold and snow, to come to sunny Barcelona and enjoy some 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit). It seems that every year the weather is nice and sunny in the end of February. Also an advantage – the planned strike of the public transportation employees (TMB) this year was cancelled last minute. So everything is ready to roll – let’s get started.

We are proud to announce that CloudTimes is an official media sponsor of the MWC this year. We’ll be covering the event live from Barcelona. Follow us on Twitter or do a search for MWC on our site – this should get you covered. For Barcelona first-timers and food lovers, I have put together some restaurant options already a few years ago – things might have changed though. Stay in touch and thanks for liking us on Facebook.

Huawei already kicked the show off today on Sunday at their press event with the introduction of the World’s Fastest Smartphone: The Ascend D quad. We’ll be hearing more about this device throughout the show.

LG has already announced that it will introduce a new line of Optimus handsets: the 4X HD. The new device is running Nvidia’s new Tegra 3, a quad-core ARM-based mobile CPU that Nvidia likes to call a “super-processor”. Not surprising since NVidia also coined the term “super phone.”

Google and Microsoft will both have several announcements at the show. Microsoft has promised to have a further glimpse at the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, ARM-ready and new tablets coming up. While Google will focus on its new Android 5.0 (“Jelly Bean”), although we don’t expect that many highlights before its Google I/O developers conference in June 2012 in San Francisco.

Cloud Computing, “mobile cloud”, will be a hot topic of course. Most operators (carriers) have cloud-based services by now and will present them. Deutsche Telekom (which usually has the biggest pavilion at MWC) will boost its new Telekom Cloud which is company is heavily promoting in Germany. There’ll be more mobile content sharing, mobile services in the cloud – as you can ever imagine.

The MWC has an impressive lineup of keynote speakers, some of them the who is who of Valley top firms, like Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, and Facebook CTO Bret Taylor. But focus is mainly still on European companies, so Telecom Italia CEO, Franco Bernabè or René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom will be speaking. Also keep an eye out for keynote speakers from Asian (hot) companies, like Peter Chou, CEO of HTC or Ryuji Yamada, CEO of NTT DoCoMo.

CU at MWC.

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