Category: Mobile World Congress

As expect, Samsung has announced the all new Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ at Mobile World Congress today.  The two flagship devices are solid upgrades to last year’s S8 series with the S9+ having some unique features over the standard S9.

The S9 and the S9+ are both powered by the Snapdragon 845 here in the US, with the S9 having 4GB of RAM and starting with 64GB of storage.  You can go up to 256GB on that built-in storage on both devices but, the S9+ will have 6GB of RAM on board.

The Galaxy S9 has a 12MP rear facing camera while the S9+ has a dual camera configuration with an adjustable aperture.  The S9 is powered by a 3000mAh battery behind the 5.8″ QHD Super AMOLED display while the 6.2″ S9+ will have a slight bigger 3500mAh battery.

Today has been a busy day for Nokia at Mobile World Congress.  Not only did they announce their first entry into the Android Go program, the Nokia 1, but they also announced three other devices that are a part of the Android One program.  Along with the Nokia 6 (2018) and Nokia 7 Plus, the company announced the new Nokia 8 Sirocco and it is clearly aiming for flagship status.

Sporting a 5.5″ QHD pOLED display with rounded edges, the Nokia 8 Sirocco provides a premium experience and performance.  It is powered by the Snapdragon 835 SoC and is coupled with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.  It will come with Android Oreo out of the box and, because it is part of the Android One program, it will come with a pure Android experience.

ARCore, the Augmented Reality SDK that allows for Android phones to create AR experiences, looks set to be one of the many things that Google is going to be releasing at Mobile World Congress next week.  According to an exclusive report in Variety, the Mountain View company will release the first version of ARCore to the public and it will work on Android Nougat and Oreo devices.

Google is set to make a major push to bring augmented reality technology (AR) to Android at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, Variety has learned from sources familiar with the company’s plans. Central to these efforts will be the release of the company’s ARCore framework, which will allow third-party developers to bring AR apps to Android phones.

This is a significant step forward for the company’s AR plans as, to this point, ARCore has only been available on Google Pixel devices in a pre-release state.

Mobile World Congress, or MWC, kicks off next week in Barcelona, Spain and even though there won’t be as many phone announcements, it doesn’t mean that it won’t be an exciting show.  For their part, Google is going to be going strong at the event with a lot of announcements and products on display.

The company updated their blog earlier today outlining their plans for MWC which includes the first set of Android Oreo Go Edition phones.  By now you are likely familiar with the Android Go apps that are available like Gmail Go, YouTube Go, Maps Go and other.  These lightweight apps are aimed to work on low cost, low memory devices.  We will get our first glimpse of them next week.

Huawei has become the latest manufacture to announce a new flagship Android phone at Mobile World Congress.  The Huawei P10 will be available in March, sporting a 5.2″ HD display, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage.  There will also be a larger P10 Plus which will have a 5.5″ QHD display, 6GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage.  Both devices will have a Leica optics dual-camera configuration for the main camera.  The P10 will have a 20MP monochrome and 12MP RGB camera at f/2.2 while the P10 Plus will have an f/1.8 aperture.  Both will have image stabilization.

Processor wise, both phones are powered by the Kirin 960 processor, an 8-core SoC running at 2.4GHz.  The lineup is a dual SIM configuration with USB-C charging, NFC and MIMO antenna arrays for both LTE and Wi-Fi.

Probably the thing that stole the announcement for Huawei however was the colors available for the P10.  This is particularly true of the Greenery color which seems to have everyone smitten.  The phone will be available in Ceramic White, Dazzling Blue, Dazzling Gold, Prestige Gold (P10), Graphite Black, Mystic Silver, Rose Gold and Greenery.  Finishes on the colors will be High GLoss, Diamond-Cut and Sandblast.  These colors were developed in cooperation with the Pantone Color Institute so clearly Huawei is taking your color choice seriously.

ZTE has introduced two new Android phones at MWC today, the Blade V7 and Blade V7 Lite.  The two devices have very similar specifications with the V7 aimed at being the premium version of the two. It sports a 5.2″ display, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage along with a octa-core processor running at 1.3 GHz.  The V7 Lite will have a quad-core processor but will have the same 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. It was also announced that the V7 will have a 13MP rear camera and 5MP front camera.  Both devices will be running Android Marshmallow