Five things missing from Mobile World Congress 2009

MWC 2009: Hide and seek

20 February 2009 11:44 GMT / By Stuart Miles

We've filed over a 120 stories from this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but what about the stuff that was missing? Here are five things that weren't at the show.

Android handsets
Not counting the prototype on the Huawei stand that was poorly lit and behind a smudged piece of glass, just one company had an Android offering at MWC this year; Vodafone's HTC Magic. Everyone else, including Samsung, LG and Motorola promised that handsets with the open source operating system were inbound, but they just failed to materialise.

New Handsets from RIM and Moto
Having a big stand at the annual phone conference doesn't equal plenty of phones launched. Both Motorola and RIM had stands showing off current offerings, but neither of them launched a handset at the show. Motorola said it was saving all its efforts for its Android handset due to be launched later in the year, while RIM seemed focused on the launch of its BlackBerry Application store in March.

iPhone
Apple has always shunned the show in favour of launching the iPhone elsewhere and at different times of the year. While Nokia, LG, Palm, Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson, and everyone else you can think of was vying for attention on the show floor, Apple was quietly sitting back in Cupertino chilling. The most attention it got was a couple of app announcements - Yawn.

Snapdragon
Following the Toshiba TG01 announcement earlier in the month as the first Snapdragon powered handset, we were expecting a wave of handsets with Netbook speeds to land in MWC. Alas that wasn't to be the case, still in an interview with Qualcomm we've been told there are plenty still on the roadmap for 2009, meaning we've still got lots of phone announcements still to come.

The credit crunch
While virtually all the CES keynote speeches featured excerpts on how the world was doomed and nobody had any money to buy the lovely TVs and gadgets the companies were touting, we didn't actually hear the "R" word once at the show. Attendance was down, but the general consensus was that the core press, buyers and movers and shakers were all still there. Some companies even told Pocket-lint that from a performance point of view they'd had a better show that in recent years.